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In 2018, Drs Manu Braganca and Fransiska Louwagie edited a volume entitled Ego-Histories of France and the Second World War (Palgrave).

This was the result of a two-day workshop co-funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant during which 14 world-leading scholars from various disciplines reflected critically on their ‘ego-history’ or intellectual journey investigating France and WWII, and particularly on the work they undertook in the wake of the so-called Paxtonian turn in the 1970s, which critically re-examined the role of the Vichy-regime and its collaborationist attitudes during the Nazi-period. The project allowed the mapping of crucial research dynamics across inter-related disciplines. By establishing a generational group portrait, the project also allowed the revisiting and extension of Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-history and was praised as a key contribution to the study of subjectivity in research (Forsdick, Fixxion, 2018).

The above project pointed towards important new questions about more recent dynamics and shifts in the field. A workshop taking place at the University of Leicester on 7 and 8 June 2022 will investigate new research positionalities and examine recent disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments. It will bring together mid-career scholars from various countries maintaining or developing strong research traditions in French Studies (the UK, Ireland and France, but also the Netherlands and Germany) and from diverse academic settings. The project, co-led by Louwagie and Bragança, will result in an edited volume and open access outputs.