Mélanie Torrent is professor of British and Commonwealth history at the Université Picardie Jules Verne, where she teaches in the department of modern languages and cultures. She was previously senior lecturer at the Université Paris Diderot (2006-2019), and is senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
Her initial research, first developed during her M.Phil in international relations at the University of Cambridge, centred on Cameroon’s admission into the Commonwealth of Nations, which was the subject of her PhD dissertation at Paris Sorbonne. Her first monograph, Diplomacy and Nation-Building : Franco-British Relations and Cameroon at the End of Empire (IB Tauris, 2012), examined how Franco-British relations on African affairs influenced the processes of nation-building in Cameroon and how, in turn, Cameroon’s political actors used the Commonwealth and Francophone worlds in their strategies for national and international legitimacy.
Her current research, funded by the Institut universitaire de France, investigates the links between decolonisation, European construction and globalisation in Britain during the Algerian war of independence, tracing networks of transnational solidarities and the impact of connected ends of empire on the making of post-colonial Britain.
She joined the editorial board of The Round Table in 2010. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Revue française de civilisation britannique and recently joined the external committee for scientific advice of the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), a research centre of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (in Lisbon) and the University of Évora.
