Marie-Pierre Ulloa, historian, sociologist and director of the Iméra’s Mediterranean research programme, will be speaking at the research seminar organised by the MMSH’s Contemporary Social Sciences team on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025.
Picture: 115 bd St-Michel, 2019 @ Marie-Pierre Ulloa.
In search of 115, boulevard St-Michel: between a North African place of memory in Paris, a North African utopia and a thwarted heritage
Marie-Pierre Ulloa offers a sensitive account of 115, boulevard St-Michel in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, a major place of memory of North African history in France, as the headquarters of AEMNA, the Association des Étudiants Musulmans d’Afrique du Nord, founded in 1927. A study of this place, where the dream of a unified Maghreb took shape, provides a micro-history of North African militancy in a spatial setting that carries a charged Orientalist memory. Destroyed in 2016, the building has been replaced by a Moroccan cultural centre awaiting inauguration.
Gathering the memorial fragments of the stones and voices of 115, through its different eras, the layout of the space across the floors and its bays, the succession of generations who have frequented it, from daily interactions to police surveillance to cultural events, makes it possible to combine the technical, social, political and symbolic dimensions to retrace the history of this emblematic place for Orientalist painters as much as for North African students in transit and all those who frequented its university restaurant.
In addition, a portrait of the building, based on a survey of various archive centres and using oral history, will help us to understand the anthropo-sociological fabric of the 115, how it fits into the urban fabric of the Latin Quarter, and to place the players in a spatial network of sociability, solidarity and rivalry at the heart of the political future of North Africa on both sides of the Mediterranean, and, ultimately, to grasp the heritage and memory issues at stake in the present day.
- Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 at 2pm in salle A219 of the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences humaines et sociales, MMSH, 5 Rue Château de l’Horloge, 13090 Aix-en-Provence
About Marie-Pierre Ulloa
Marie-Pierre Ulloa teaches at Stanford University and heads the Mediterranean research programme at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix Marseille Université. She is an associate researcher at the Mesopolhis laboratory. She has written a monograph on the existentialist philosopher Francis Jeanson, leader of the ‘porteurs de valises’ (Francis Jeanson, un intellectuel en dissidence, de la Résistance à la guerre d’Algérie, Stanford University Press, 2008) and a collective portrait of North Africans in California (Le Nouveau rêve américain, du Maghreb à la Californie, CNRS éditions, 2019).
She has just contributed to the collective work La Méditerranée traversée, published by Presses de Provence, amU éditions on May 22nd, 2025, edited by Saïd Belguidoum and Constance de Gourcy. Her article is entitled La traversée Marseille-Alger de Rodolfo Alvarez – Hiver 1959.
