Experts Next Door: American Women and Expatriate Life in Interwar Paris

Since the founding of the United States, France and its capital have held a singular place in the American imagination. The trans-atlantic conversation that flourished throughout the 19th century between America and its oldest ally was uniquely important to the development of American identity. After WWI, this Franco-American relationship only deepened as thousands of Americans flocked to Paris.

This discussion will consider an important segment of expatriates to Paris post-WWI: American women. What drove so many American women out of their own country after 1918, and what, in particular, did they hope to find in Paris? To what extent did American women who felt constrained and limited by life at home find freedom in expatriation? Through tracing the lives of women such as the Harlem Renaissance poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and the founder of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Sylvia Beach, this presentation will explore the gendered experience of expatriation in this new, modern era of mobility.

This talk forms part of a two-part Women's History Month series, Women in Migration: Epistemologies and Expatriation from the United States to the Francophone World.

Bio: Caitlin O’Keefe is a PhD Candidate in History and French Studies at New York University. She received her BA in History from Fordham and holds a MA in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. Caitlin’s current project considers the feminist roots and revolutionary reading culture of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. Caitlin’s writing on Shakespeare and Company has previously appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and Modernism/ Modernity.

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This event has been POSTPONED from March 5, 2026 to March 16, 2026 at 7 PM, due to speaker illness.