Yevan Terrien

My research and teaching focus on the early Americas and the Atlantic World, with an emphasis on social history, colonialism, labor, and racial slavery.

My first book manuscript, “Deserting Louisiana: Unfree Workers and Runaways in an Early American Colony,” examines the creation, management, and resistance of an unfree, multiracial workforce in the Mississippi Valley. This project builds upon my doctoral research, which was awarded the Herbert Gutman prize for best dissertation in U.S. labor and working-class history and the best article prize in French colonial history.

I am citizen in France and the European Union, and a former Social Studies teacher. Before joining OU in January 2025, I was a visiting instructor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

I teach courses on early and modern America, slavery, the Atlantic world, and Native Americans.

Selected publications:

“Baptiste and Marianne’s Balbásha’: Enslavement, Freedom, and Belonging in Early New Orleans (1733-1748),” Journal of American History (Fall 2023), https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/110/2/230/7281085

“More of a Danger to the Colony Than the Enemy Himself”: Military Labor, Desertion, and Imperial Rule in French Louisiana (ca. 1715-1760),’” in A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600-1850, ed. Matthias van Rossum et al. (University of California Press, 2019), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh1dvh6.10