Megan Brown
Associate Professor
History
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Affiliations: History
Interests: modern Europe, European integration, empire, scandal
Megan Brown is a historian of Modern Europe with a focus on twentieth-century France, European integration, empire, and scandal. Her teaching and research interests include post-World War II politics, decolonization, and the questions of citizenship.
She is currently researching the Ballets Roses affair, a scandal that gripped late-1950s Paris. The affair, in which twenty-three adults went to trial, accused of “debauching” five girls and young women, was one of many scandals that rocked France in the postwar era. Those implicated in the scandal included a high-ranking politician, a suspected collaborator, and multiple police officers. As part of this project, Professor Brown is examining the wider landscape of postwar France, including shifting understandings of morals, unresolved conflicts from the war years, and political intrigue that marked the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republics.
Her first book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022) won the 2025 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies. The Seventh Member State interrogates the role of empire in the formation of integrated post-1945 European institutions (European Coal and Steel Community; European Economic Community; and more). It examines how and why current notions of “Europe” and European identity emerged and what other possible forms of integration were debated and planned following World War II, particularly as France’s empire began to shrink.
Professor Brown received her PhD in History from the Graduate Center, CUNY. At Swarthmore, she teaches surveys of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a variety of courses on topics including postwar Western Europe, French-Algerian relations, nationalism, and internationalism. Professor Brown is a former Fulbright Scholar to France and her writing has been published in Modern & Contemporary France and French Politics, Culture & Society.
