Yasmine Najm is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Utrecht, where she works within the ERC Consolidator project (2024–2029) COOPERATION, led by Prof. Ozan Ozavci. Her postdoctoral project focuses on the Sanitary Council of Tangier in the 19th century, examining the intersections of health governance, diplomacy, and imperial competition in the Mediterranean space.
She holds a Ph.D. in Global Studies from Leipzig University (2026) and a doctoral research certificate from the École Normale Supérieure – PSL (Paris) within the Franco-German Doctoral Training Program in Cultural Transfers. Her dissertation, entitled Printing the National Empire: French Official Journals and Imperial Respatialization in the Metropole and Indochina, 1799–1909, is under contract with De Gruyter's Dialectics of the Global Series (DIGLO). The project repositions the French official press as a constitutive medium of imperial statehood rather than a mere administrative archive, showing how journals such as Le Moniteur Universel, Le Courrier de Saïgon, and the Journal Officiel de l'Indochine française functioned as textual infrastructures that actively produced, organized, and legitimized colonial and metropolitan space. Drawing on digital humanities methods, including corpus analysis and spatial text mining, the project introduces the concept of the “national empire” to argue that the official press, the very instrument used to nationalize the metropolitan core in the aftermath of the French Revolution, was subsequently deployed to extend French ordering logics such as law, publicity, rationality onto extra-European spaces, thereby incorporating the colonies into French administrative discourse while denying their indigenous populations the rights of citizenship, political representation, and civic equality that this same discourse proclaimed.
She further holds an M.A. in Global Studies from Leipzig University and an M.Sc. with distinction in Global Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Since March 2024, she has been a Contributing Researcher on The Revue des Colonies: A Digital Scholarly Edition and Translation at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has presented her work at international venues including the French Colonial Historical Society, the Society for French Historical Studies, the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH), ENS-PSL, and the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence.