Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize

A member of Stanford’s Class of 2024, De Los Santos is majoring in French with a minor in History. She holds a Hume Honors Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2023-24. In fall 2024, she will begin a PhD program in History at Emory University. In her prize-winning thesis, De Los Santos examines the implications of Article 7 of the French abolition decree of 1848, which stipulates that “the principle that the soil of France emancipates the enslaved who touches it is applied to the colonies and possessions of the Republic.” She argues that the decree’s impact on the flight of enslaved Africans seeking liberation exposed and exacerbated the precarity of French colonial presence in Senegal. De Los Santos shows that those pursuing freedom used French legislation and republican ideals to challenge the bounds of colonial authority, commercial control, and political influence; that even the most vulnerable members of society, such as single mothers and orphans, participated in posing this challenge; and, generally, that the pursuit of liberation in post-abolition Senegal defied French and African societal and geographic boundaries to catalyze political and social reform in mid-nineteenth-century West Africa.