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, French-Jewish history, history and video games, and the history of gender.
Her newest 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).
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.
Ph.D., Stanford University
M.A., Stanford University
B.A. in History and Political Science, University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa)
Haiti, France, Film, Colonialism, Slavery and Memory, Jewish, Gender, Historical Video Games
Selected reviews of Slave Revolt on Screen
(more available at my Academia.edu page)
"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.
“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.
“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.
History 102 World Civilizations, 1500 - present
History 301 Historical Methods and Writing
History 324 Enlightenment and European Society
History 325 Revolutionary Europe, 1789 - 1989
History 381 Comparative French Colonialism, from the Caribbean to Indochina
History 382 Travel and Contact in the Early Modern World
History 383 Women and Jewish History
History 386 Haiti and World History
History 460 Senior Research Seminar in World History
History 513 Graduate History Teaching Practicum
History 591 Advanced Seminar in World History
History 620 Directed Thesis Research, Writing, and Media Presentation