Sarah Griswold

Biography

Sarah Griswold is an Associate Professor of European History at the College of the Holy Cross. A historian of modern France and Europe trained in history, French studies, and museum studies, her research explores the politics of cultural heritage, war and contested administration in the twentieth century. Prior to her academic career, she worked for six years in history and art museums in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her current research investigates the built environment of the WWII-era occupation, liberation, and reconstruction of Normandy from 1940 into the 1950s, with a separate public history project in development on the afterlives of European fascist regimes' material culture after 1945.

Select Publications

• Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate. Cornell University Press, 2025.
• "The Traders: Archaeology, Family & Fortunes between Saïda and Paris." In Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East, 137–151. Bloomsbury, 2025.
• Introductory Essay: "French Studies and its Public(s)." French Politics, Culture & Society 42, no. 3 (2025).
• "The League of Curators: Museums, Internationalism, and War in 1930s Europe." War & Society 43, no. 3 (2024): 294–312.
• "An Early International Moment for Antiquities Restitution and Panic at the Louvre." Journal of the Western Society for French Historical Studies 49, no. 3 (2023): 19–32.
• "Archaeological Expertise: Debating Antiquities Norms in the A Mandates, 1918–1926." In Experts et expertises dans les mandats de la Société des Nations, 141–158. Les Presses de l'Inalco, 2020.
• "High-Tech Heritage: Planes, Photography, and the Ancient Past in the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon." Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation 16, no. 2 (2019): 1–16.
• "The Colonial Museum of Marseille: Empire and Object in the 'Porte de l'Orient'." The Journal of the History of Collections 30, no. 3 (2018): 395–406.
• "Allies in Eastern Trenches: Archaeological Salvage Operations in the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon." Journal of Levantine Studies 8, no. 1 (2018): 121–144.