Katherine Ibbett (University of Oxford) presents on ‘A View from the Riverbank: Julien Poydras of Louisiana, 1777-1810’.

In this talk I explore some elements of the varied career of one Julien Poydras of False River, Louisiana: enslaver, poet, defender of (French) Roman law in the new United States. These elements have in common a particular relation to the bank of the river. Drawing on the history of the French term 'riverain,' I ask how the view from Poydras’s riverbank might illuminate questions of residency, settlement and violent displacement in colonial Louisiana and its aftermath.

Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and tutorial fellow of Trinity College. She works on early modern cultural histories in France and the French Americas, and is the author of Compassion's Edge (2018) and The Style of the State (2009). She's currently completing a book on rivers and residency in the seventeenth century; this talk is related to some of the book's work on the Mississippi, but takes in much later material.