Habilitation defence - Marie Laure Geoffray (with Dorota Dakowska on the jury)

Thursday 5 June 2025 | from 1.30pm | Espace Philippe Séguin (room 101)

The HDR defence of Marie Laure Geoffray, MCF at Sorbonne Nouvelle Universitywill take place on Thursday 5 June 2025 at 1.30 pm at Sciences Po Aix (Espace Philippe Séguin, 31 av. Jean Delmas, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, room EPS 101).

The original brief is entitled The anti-Castro cause (1959-2019). An essential link in the international anticommunist movement in the Americas (408 pages)

Summary:

Miami is the second Cuba, the Cuba of exile and anti-Castro sentiment, the Cuba of nostalgia for the world before. This exile, often caricatured in numerous books, films and documentaries, has popularised a crude portrait of the anti-Castro cause. Rather than dismissing anti-Castro demands as the result of a homogeneous bourgeois and conservative exile, and therefore politically illegitimate, this book proposes to take the anti-Castro cause seriously.

The investigation in the unpublished manuscript of the HDR sets out to reconstruct the genesis of this cause, to understand the logics of its emergence in an environment marked by the divisions of the Cold War and to grasp how it moved from guerrilla warfare to human rights activism and then to conservative think tanks. Taking the anti-Castro cause as its subject over the long term (1959-2020), this work highlights the shifting dimension of the cause, which is both transnational and highly localised, marked by the ideal of armed struggle without neglecting diplomatic forums, and torn between an imaginary of martyrdom on the one hand and human rights on the other.

The jury is made up of :

• Sophie BabyUniversity of Burgundy (rapporteur)
• Dorota DakowskaSciences Po Aix (guarantor)
• Jorge DuanyFlorida International University
• Camille GoirandUniversité Sorbonne Nouvelle (Chair)
• Laurent JeanpierrePanthéon-Sorbonne University (rapporteur)
• Laure NeumayerUniversity of Picardie Jules Verne (rapporteur)

No hybrid format.