Hi! I’m Zoe.

Download my most recent CV here. Also feel free to add me on Linkedin and Academia.edu.

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I’m an aspiring digital historian, who studies networks, ideas, and spaces in modern history. I specialize in American, Middle Eastern, and North African histories, and consider myself an international historian. I like thinking about race and religion, especially from the perspective of institutions and states.

Things that fascinate me (in no particular order):

• The resurgence of religion in the second half of the twentieth century across the globe
• The relationship(s) between states and social movements
• The power of ideas and ideologies to naturalize and denaturalize
• The relationship(s) between space and time for constituting place
• The rise of ‘health’ as a discourse in the second half of the twentieth century
• The use of probablistic statistics to understand historical discourses and events
• The relationship(s) between local, national, and international
• The potential for technology to augment historical research

These are all the topics I can think of at the moment, but there’s many more questions that I like to spend my day stewing over.

At the moment, I’m a Canadian expat who is lucky enough to call Nashville, TN home while I complete my doctorate in history at Vanderbilt Univeristy.

Some of things I’m working on at the moment include:

• Researching my dissertation
• Improving my programming skills (specifically python and ruby)
• Building websites
• Practicing Arabic
• Learning how to build deep maps
• Thinking about digital pedagogy

Feel free to drop me a line via twitter or my contact page, and I’ll try and get back to you quickly. I’m happy to talk about my research, potential collaborations, or the virtues of ice cream and nutella.

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Academic Bio

Zoe LeBlanc is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, “Constructing Anti-Colonial Cairo: the United Arab Republic’s role in Anti-Colonial Movements during the Cold War”, and examines the emergence of Cairo as a hub for anti-colonial activism in Africa in the wake of decolonization and the escalation of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Zoe is broadly interested in the intersections of spatial, intellectual, and social movement history. Zoe’s other projects include American Protestant missionaries in the Third World after 1945, and the history of modern Islamic international organizations and Islamic law. Zoe completed her comprehensive examinations in the fields of: United States in the World, Modern Middle Eastern and North African History; and American History Since 1865.

Zoe also works in digital history, and is interested in exploring the development of statistical models and web applications for historical research. Zoe’s research is currently supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Vanderbilt University.

Zoe graduated from the University of Toronto in 2010 with her Honours Bachelor of Arts with high distinction. Zoe is fluent in both English and French, with an honours Bilingual certificate from the Ontario government. She also has advanced traning in Arabic, and has traveled to Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey. Zoe is currently working with Dr. Thomas A. Schwartz, Dr. Paul Kramer, and Dr. Leor Halevi. For a more detailed list of Zoe’s activities, please see her CV.

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