A Lancaster University historian has been awarded a prestigious fellowship enabling him to research how law shaped the experience of race and slavery in the early modern French empire.

The project will examine the circulation and negotiation of French imperial law across different colonies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, exploring how law could serve as a vehicle for institutions of slavery and racial discrimination to spread throughout the empire.

North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Lenny Hodges has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which he will take up at Birkbeck, University of London, in the next academic year.

The three-year, full-time Fellowship, for early career researchers with a research record but who have not yet held a full-time permanent academic post, enables them to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.

The hope is that it will also lead to a more permanent position, either within the same or another institution.

Dr Hodges, who completed his PhD at King’s College, London, before starting at Lancaster in 2020, is a historian of early modern empires, with specific expertise in the French empire and the European presence in the Indian Ocean.

He is particularly interested in the role of trading companies in shaping the early modern world.

“I’m delighted to have this opportunity to begin an exciting new project on the early modern French empire. It will allow me to take my research in new directions that will feed into my next book project,” said Dr Hodges.

And the Department of History’s Research Director, Professor Will Pettigrew, said: “This is fantastic news for Lenny and for the department. The Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships are very prestigious and this is a tremendous funding success.”