Stéphanie Ponsavady's research focuses on the development of transportation systems, with special attention given to roads and the automobile, in the French Colonial Empire. Her first book, Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) examines the history of automobility in French Indochina at the turn of the twentieth century, analyzing archival material and French and Vietnamese literature to critically assess French colonialism. Broadening her research chronologically and geographically, her current project, An Empire of Drivers, questions the congruence and interplay of France’s automobile culture and colonial history by examining the specifics of the automobile as social and cultural object. She recently contributed to an episode of the BBC World Service program The Forum on the joy and sorrow of roads. She is Adjunct Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies and an Affiliate with the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. 

She teaches seminars on France and Asia, the South of France, mobilities, and the writing of history in French.