BIOGRAPHY

Joseph Peterson is a scholar of empire, race, and incarceration who teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Modern History, the Los Angeles Review of Books, French Historical Studies, Age of Revolutions, and elsewhere. His book, Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Peterson is also the founder and director of the Mississippi Prison Arts and Education Project and has spent hundreds of hours visiting and teaching inside correctional facilities in Mississippi.

PROJECT : Recidivism, Race, and Escape in a French Penal Colony

In 1885, in the grip of a social panic about crime and recidivism, France passed a law that would deport petty crime "recidivists" to the penal colony in French Guiana for life. Peterson’s research seeks to understand the colonial and racial discourses that motivated this punitive law, the impact the law had on France’s colonial subjects, and the role of religious or other reformers in offering aid to the deported. In our own age of anxiety and incarceration, we could learn much from looking back to a previous moment when so-called “habitual” offenders were dehumanized.