Emmanuelle Saada joined the department of French and romance philology at Columbia University in 2006. She received her academic training in France, where she studied sociology and history at the École Normale Supérieureand and, in 2001, received her Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
Saada's main field of research and teaching is the history of the French empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a specific interest in law. Her first book, Les enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l'Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté, was published in France in 2007 and translated in 2012 under the title Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (University of Chicago Press).
Saada is currently writing a historiographical book that reflects on French and European colonization as a history of the present. She is also working on a project on law and violence in Algeria and France in the 19th century.