Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

About Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Professor of History (on sabbatical, 2026-2027)

2023 CSU Wang Award Winner, Outstanding Faculty Teaching (selected from all 23 campuses in the CSU and honored for distinguished teaching)

Prof. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall earned a B.A. in intellectual history and political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Stanford University. Before coming to CSUSM, she was Lucius N. Littauer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2000, Prof. Sepinwall was one of thirty early-career scholars selected to participate in the International Seminar on the Atlantic World at Harvard University. Her research specialties include the French and Haitian Revolutions, modern Haitian history, Slavery and Film, French colonialism, modern Jewish history, history and video games, the history of gender, and the history of ideas of racism and antiracism.

Her most recent book, Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (which received the Honorable Mention for the 2021 HSA biennial Book Prize, Haitian Studies Association and was named a CHOICE Top 10 Editors' Pick), was published in June 2021 by the University Press of Mississippi. Her previous works include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (UC Press, 2005; released in paperback, 2021) and Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012).

Sepinwall is the 2023 recipient of the California State University's top honor for teaching, the systemwide Wang Family Excellence Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching. She is also a past winner of CSUSM’s Harry E. Brakebill Outstanding Professor Award (the university’s top honor for faculty, 2014), as well as of the CSUSM President's Award for Innovation in Teaching (2004). In 2026, she received a fellowship from the Beinecke Library at Yale University to support research on her new book project (under contract with SUNY Press), about antiracist Jewish writers in Hollywood in the mid-20th century.

Sepinwall has served on committees of the American Historical Association, Society for French Historical Studies, Western Society for French History, Haitian Studies Association, French Colonial Historical Society, H-France, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, World History Association and Western Jewish Studies Association, and as a member of the editorial board of French Historical Studies. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for H-France's Imaginaries (previously called Fiction and Film for Scholars of France) and the Haitian History Journal/Revue d'Histoire Haïtienne.

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Education

Ph.D., Stanford University

M.A., Stanford University

B.A. in History and Political Science, University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa)

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Research

Haiti, France, Film, Colonialism, Slavery and Memory, Jewish, Gender, Historical Video Games

Publications:

BOOKS

Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi, 2021).
- CHOICE Top 10 Editors' Pick for April 2022.
- Honorable Mention for the 2021 HSA biennial Book Prize, Haitian Studies Association.
- Selected talks on the book:
  - Stanford University/Silicon Valley Archives/Claremont Colleges, Sept. 2021
  - Rice University, Book Salon (moderated by Dr. Jacqueline Couti), Sept. 2021
  - Society for French Historical Studies, French Presse Book Salon, in conversation with Dr. Christy Pichichero, July 2021
  - UC Berkeley/ORIAS Summer Institute on Forced Labor for World History Instructors, June 2021
  - Other talks on the book at Austrian Association for American Studies (2021); Society for Cinema and Media Studies French & Francophone SIG (2021); UC Irvine (2022); Washington State University - Vancouver (2022); University of Louisiana – Lafayette (2022), Valdosta University (2022), University of San Diego (2022), Goucher College (2022), Georgetown University (2022), St. Mary's College of Maryland (2022), University of Oldenburg Games & Geschichte series (2022).
- Selected reviews of Slave Revolt on Screen
- - Esclavages et post~esclavages, by Prof. Nadève Ménard
- Selected interviews and podcasts on the book:
  - American Historical Review Interview podcast, with Prof. Andrew Denning
  - New Books Network, interview with Prof. Michael Vann
  - KPBS Radio, Midday Edition, with film critic Beth Accomando
  - Freedom Now! - KPFK Pacifica Radio, Los Angeles, interview with Dr. Gerald Horne
  - HistoryHit, “How the Haitian Revolution is Depicted on Screen, From Hollywood to Assassin’s Creed,” interview with Kyle Hoekstra.
  - Nèg Mawon podcast, interview with Patrick Jean-Baptiste
  - This Week in Black History, Society, and Culture Podcast, interview with Prof. Hettie V. Williams
  - Haiti Then and Now blog, with Prof. Celucien Joseph
  - History Respawned, with Prof. Robert Whitaker
  - History Film Club (UK), with Profs. Alex von Tunzelmann and Hannah Greig
  - More Than Work Podcast, with Rabiah Coon
  - Making Florida Home Podcast, with Dr. Myriam Mompoint
  - Del Mar Times, with Luke Harold
  - Ludo History Channel, with Adam Bierstedt [on the game Steel Rising and my research]
  - History N' Games, "The Eye-Opening Truth on the Haitian Revolution," with Megan Sullivan
  - Well That Aged Well Podcast, The St. Domingue Uprising, with Erlend Hedegart

Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012).
- Podcast on the book, for New Books Network with Ari Barbalat (August 2024)
The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (University of California Press, 2005; paperback edition, 2021)
- Translated as L'abbé Grégoire et la Révolution française: les origines de l'universalisme moderne (Bécherel: Éditions Les Perséides, 2008).
  - Podcast on the book, for New Books Network with Brigid Wallace (October 2021)

SELECTED JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS AND PUBLIC-FACING ESSAYS

"Fleeing Enslaver Mindsets, Re-Envisioning the Archives" [review essay on Sara Johnson's Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World], Age of Revolutions, Feb. 12, 2024.

"Unsilencing the Haitian Revolution in US Hip Hop," Black Perspectives [African American Intellectual History Society], Aug. 22, 2023.

"Before Silencing the Past: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Stirring the Pot of Haitian History," Age of Revolutions, Aug. 22, 2022.

"Thorough Modern Maxie: Robespierre's Relevance to Democracy Today," Age of Revolutions, Aug. 8, 2022.

“Whiteness, Gender and Slavery in Enlightenment Le Havre: Marie Le Masson Le Golft’s Self-Fashioning as a Femme des Lettres,” Journal of the Western Society for French History 48 (2002) [special issue “In the Crucible of Race: Lives that Matter in French and Francophone Spaces,” edited by Christy Pichichero and Jennifer Boittin], 20-36.

"Papa Dessalines est ressuscité! Dessalines s'est réveillé!" [review of new documentary by Arnold Antonin on Haitian Revolution leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines], Le Nouvelliste [Haiti], Feb. 10, 2022.
- English version: "Perspective: Here’s Why You Should Watch the New Documentary Film by Arnold Antonin," Ayibopost [Haiti], Feb. 11, 2022.
“Downloadable Context: Why A Historian of Haiti Came to Study Video Games (& How Other Historians Are Too!),” Age of Revolutions, Dec. 13, 2021.

“Teach Your Family: A Pandemic Assessment That’s Here to Stay” [co-written with Rachel Mesch and Annette Joseph-Gabriel], Perspectives on History 59, no. 8 (Nov. 2021).

“Making the Enlightenment Relevant in the Twenty-First Century: The Enlightenment and Its Readers,” H-France Salon 13, no. 11 (2021), special issue on “Race, Racism & the Study of France and the Francophone World, Part III."
“Earthquakes and Storms are Natural, but Haiti’s Disasters are Man-Made, Too,” Washington Post, Aug. 20, 2021 [co-written with Emmanuela Douyon, Made by History section].

Cited in Haitian Bridge Alliance v. Biden, filed 12/20/21, regarding deportations and treatment of Haitian migrants.

“Biography, Reclaimed: Looking Back at the Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution,” Age of Revolutions, Aug. 9, 2021.

“How Hollywood Has Ignored the Haitian Revolution,” Black Perspectives [blog of the African American Intellectual History Society], July 16, 2021 (featured in TIME Magazine's History newsletter for July 2021).

“Liberté, Equality, #ICantBreathe! Teaching the Age of Revolutions Using the NBA’s 2020 Summer Restart,” Age of Revolutions, Aug. 17, 2020.

“Addressing Current Events in the World History Classroom,” World History Connected 15, no. 2 (June 2018).
“Black Lives Matter in History Too: Slavery, Memory and the Haitian Revolution in Chris Rock’s Top Five,” Journal of American Culture 41, no. 1 (March 2018) [special issue on U.S. Slavery in the Popular Imagination], 5-16.
“Beyond The Black Jacobins: Haitian Revolution Historiography Comes of Age,” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 2017), 4 - 34.

“New Directions in French Holocaust Film: The Origin of Violence, Once in a Lifetime, and Victor Young Perez,” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin 7, no. 2 (Jan. 2017)

“Never Again? Reflections on Interviewing Elie Wiesel in 2007,” History News Network (July 31, 2016).

“Reimagining Jewish-Muslim Relations on Screen: French-Jewish Filmmakers and the Middle East Conflict,” in Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich, eds., The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 302 – 322.

“History is Too Important to Leave to Hollywood: Colonialism, Genocide, and Memory in the Films of Raoul Peck,” in Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just, eds., Raoul Peck: Power, Politics and the Cinematic Imagination (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 13 - 36.

“Lumières et esclavages [Débat Gainot/Dorigny/Ehrard/ Sepinwall],” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 380 (juin 2015): 149 - 169.

“Sexuality, Orthodoxy and Modernity in France: North African Jewish Immigrants in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem,” in Lawrence Baron, ed., Modern Jewish Experiences in World Cinema (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 340 – 347.

“If This is a Woman: Evelyne Trouillot’s The Infamous Rosalie and the Lost Stories of New World Slavery,” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin 5, no. 4 (February 2015).

“Still Unthinkable? The Haitian Revolution and the Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past,” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 75 – 103.

“Teaching about Haiti in World History: An Introduction,” World History Connected 10, no. 2 (June 2013).

Radio Interview on Haitian History and the 2010 Earthquake, Chicago Public Radio, “Worldview” (with host Jerome McDonnell), Jan. 27, 2010.

Co-editor, special issue of the World History Bulletin on France in World History, with Michael G. Vann, vol. XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2010) [including her article "Is This Tocqueville or George W. Bush: Teaching French Colonialism in Southern California After 9/11," pp. 18-23].

"Robespierre, Old Regime Feminist: Gender, the Late Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution Revisited," in Journal of Modern History 82, no. 1 (March 2010): 1 - 29.

"The Specter of Saint-Domingue: American and French Reactions to the Haitian Revolution," in The World of the Haitian Revolution, eds. Norman Fiering and David Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

"Atlantic Revolutions," in Encyclopedia of the Modern World, ed. Peter Stearns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), I: 284-289.

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing With a Priest Like This? Biography, Jewish Studies, and Gentile Subjects, in AJS Perspectives (Spring 2007): 30-32.

"Napoleon, French Jews, and the Idea of Regeneration," in CCAR Journal 54 [special issue on Sanhedrin Bicentennial] (Winter 2007), 55-76.

"L'abbé Grégoire and the Metz Contest: The View from New Documents," in Revue des Études Juives 166, nos. 1-2 (janvier - juin 2007), pp. 273-288.

"Atlantic Amnesia: French Historians, the Haitian Revolution and the 2004-6 CAPES Exam," in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 34 (2006): 300-314.

"Strategic Friendships: Jewish Intellectuals, the Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution," in Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From Al-Andalus to the Haskalah, eds. Adam Sutcliffe and Ross Brann (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004): 189-212.

"Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference: Blacks, Jews, and the Abbé Grégoire," in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Tyler Stovall and Sue Peabody (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 28-41.

"La révolution haïtienne et les États-Unis: Étude historiographique," in 1802. Rétablissement de l'esclavage dans les colonies françaises: Aux origines de Haïti, eds. Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003), 387-401.