Cécile Vidal is directrice d’études (professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and a visiting researcher at MFO during Michaelmas term. She is a social historian of colonial empires, the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic worlds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In addition to Histoire de l'Amérique française (History of French America, Flammarion, 2003; 5th ed. 2019), co-authored with Gilles Havard, she is the author of Caribbean New Orleans : Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (OIEAHC and University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and the editor or coeditor of ten collective volumes, including, most recently, Une histoire sociale du Nouveau Monde (A Social History of the New Word, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2021), and Les mondes de l’esclavage. Une histoire comparée (The Worlds of Slavery. A Comparative History, Seuil, 2021), co-edited with Paulin Ismard and Benedetta Rossi. She is currently working on a new research project on suicide, the slave trade, and slavery in the British and French Atlantic empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.