Graduate Student Bios

Ayelet Marron is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of the US military empire. She researches the first large-scale occupation the US undertook in World War II – the occupation of French North Africa – from an economic perspective. Her dissertation, “Bargaining for Freedom in WWII: the Laws of the Market in American-occupied French North Africa”, explores how American occupation norms were forged in the economic encounter between American, French, and Maghrebi actors – men and women, military and civilian, social welfare organizers and business owners, in positions of governance and in everyday roles. She examines how these actors negotiated the meaning of liberation through a wide range of economic activities – from welfare and reconstruction policies to everyday exchanges in the margins of licit and capitalist markets. To this end, she combines methods from economic anthropology, gender analysis, and legal history. Marron earned her BSc and MA from Tel Aviv University, where she wrote a thesis on US Army servicewomen in North Africa. Her doctoral dissertation is supervised by Dr. Jennifer Mittelstadt, and it has been supported by the Society for Military History (SMH) and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).