Graduate Student Bios

Ayelet Marron is a doctoral candidate in history, specializing in American foreign relations. Her dissertation, “Occupation Economics in WWII”, examines the first large-scale occupation the US undertook in World War II – French North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia). American occupation administrators constructed occupation as liberation while reinforcing French colonial rule. Their economic policies became blueprints for postwar military interventions and foreign aid programs that preserved European colonialism under US hegemony. Each chapter deconstructs an economic paradigm – Aid, Relief, Trade, Compensation – by analyzing how American occupation administrators negotiated its meaning with French and Maghrebi actors in diverse domains – welfare and labor, market controls, reconstruction and production. 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).