bios

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short biographies of the speakers (listed in alphabetical order)

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Dr Manu Bragança is Assistant Professor of French Studies at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at University College Dublin where he is also a member of the Centre for War Studies and of the Humanities Institute. His research and teaching focuses on the memories of the Second World War in France and on contemporary France. He is an editor of the online research platform H-France and an assistant editor of the journal Open Cultural Studies. His recent publications include The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War (2016, coedited with Peter Tame), Ego-Histories of France and the Second World War (2018, coedited with Fransiska Louwagie) and Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives (2019).

Dr Ludivine Broch (University of Westminster) is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Ordinary Workers: French Railwaymen, Vichy and the Holocaust (2016) which was published by Cambridge University Press and translated into French with Tallandier. She edited a volume on France in the period of the World Wars, has contributed chapters to edited volumes and written several articles on the topic of rescue in the Holocaust, memory, railwaymen and most recently on colonial resisters in Vichy France. Her work has appeared in Diaspora, Contemporary European History and French Politics, Culture and Society. She is currently working on a history of material culture, emotions and international relations in postwar France which has been funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme.

Prof. Maxime Decout (University of Aix-Marseille) is Professor of French literature at the University of Aix-Marseille and a member of the IUF (Institut Universitaire de France). He is the author of two books dedicated to the relationship between Jewishness and literature: Albert Cohen : les fictions de la judéité (2011) and Écrire la judéité (2015). He is also the author of four books published by Les Éditions de Minuit: En toute mauvaise foi (2015), Qui a peur de l’imitation? (2017), Pouvoirs de l’imposture (2018) and Eloge du mauvais lecteur (2020). He edited La Disparition, Les Revenentes and Le Voyage d’hiver of Perec for “La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” (2017) and wrote Romain Gary (“Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 2019). He is the founder, with Nelly Wolf, of the seminar French Jewish Writers and of the LIEJ association (Literature and Jewishness).

Dr Lindsey Dodd (University of Huddersfield) is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Huddersfield. Her research focuses on French children’s wartime lives. She is the author of French Children under the Allied Bombs, 1940-1945: An Oral History (MUP, 2016) and the editor of Everyday Life in Wartime France: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime (Bloomsbury, 2018, with D. Lees). She is particularly interested in methodological and epistemological perspectives on affect and emotions and her second monograph, on this topic, entitled Feeling Memory: Remembering French Wartime Childhoods will appear in 2022.

Dr Thomas Fontaine is the Director of the Musée National de la Résistance (National Resistance Museum) in Paris. After completing his CAPES in 1998 (secondary school teaching certificate in France), he taught for a couple of years in secondary schools before securing a Research Fellow position in the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation (FMD, Foundation for the Memory of the Deportees). This research developed into a PhD in History which he completed in 2013. He is the author of Les Oubliés de Romainville. Histoire d’un camp allemand en France (2005) and has coedited many volumes, including Graffiti de résistants. Sur les murs du fort de Romainville, 1940-1944 (2012) and Cheminots victimes de la répression (2017). He has also organised several exhibitions, designed pedagogical material for the WWII Caen Memorial and wrote several catalogues for WWII history museums and memorials around France.

Prof. Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University) has been researching literatures, histories and memories of the Second World War in France since her PhD on French women’s writing and narratives of the Occupation in post-1968 France. Her work analyses under-represented or neglected French voices and the war years. This has led to publications that interrogate representations of war in French popular culture, above all post-war crime fiction (the roman noir) and comics and graphic novels from artists who reflect on familial legacies of the Holocaust. More recently, she has begun to work on photography for a transnational project on culture, reconstruction and the aftermath of the Second World War. 

Dr Aurélia Kalisky is a Research Fellow in French and Holocaust Studies at the Berlin Centre for Literary and Cultural Research. Her research focuses on political violence, collective memory and the politics of memory that follow traumatic events and historical disasters. She holds a PhD in comparative literature but her approach has become more interdisciplinary after she started investigating Holocaust survivors’ early writing. She is currently investigating the epistemological problems raised by the denial of historical catastrophes and how this impacts the writing of history. Her research has appeared in some of the best journals in French language dedicated to the Holocaust, including Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah and Archives Juives.

Dr Sébastien Ledoux is a Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His research focuses on the memory of traumatic events (the Second World War, the Algerian War, Slavery, terrorist attacks) and more specifically on the epistemology of memory, education, memory politics and cultural memory. He is the author of Le Devoir de mémoire (CNRS Éditions, 2016) and La Nation en récit (Belin, 2021), the editor of Memory Laws in Europe (2020), and the co-editor of ‘The Digital as Memory Environment’ (Memories at Stake, 2021), ‘Memories of The Algerian War’ (Memories at Stake, 2022), and Transmettre l’Europe à la jeunesse (PUR, 2022). He is on the editorial board of the journal Mémoires en jeu/Memories at stake.

Dr Daniel Lee (Queen Mary University of London) is a historian of the Second World War and a specialist in the history of Jews in France and North Africa during the Holocaust. His first book, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–42 (OUP, 2014) explored the coexistence between young French Jews and the Vichy regime. His second book, The SS Officer’s Armchair (Jonathan Cape, 2020) examines the life of a low-ranking SS officer from Stuttgart whose personal documents were recently discovered sewn into the cushion of an armchair. He is currently working on a history of the Jews of Tunisia during the Second World War, and he is also the Principal Investigator on a British Academy GCRF Sustainable Development Programme project entitled, “Traces of Jewish Memory in Contemporary Tunisia”.

Dr David Lees is Associate Professor in French at the University of Warwick, where he is also Deputy Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. David has published on film propaganda in France from the 1930s to the present day and, with Lindsey Dodd, edited Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939-1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). David was one of the editors of The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture (2019) and his forthcoming monograph (Propaganda in Modern France, 1939-1974, with Palgrave Macmillan) examines the portrayal of a number of consistent themes in film propaganda in France between the Daladier government in 1939 and the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Dr Fransiska Louwagie is Associate Professor in French at the University of Leicester. She is Vice-Chair of the University Council of Modern Languages, a member of the AHRC-Peer Review College, and also sits on the editorial board of the journal Modern and Contemporary France. She is the PI of ‘Covid in Cartoons’ (AHRC, 350k) and a member of the SSHRC-funded project ‘Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education’. She is the author of Témoignage et littérature d’après Auschwitz (2020) and has co-edited several volumes and thematic issues, including:  Un ciel de sang et de cendres. Piotr Rawicz et la solitude du témoin (2013); Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (2018, coedited with Manuel Bragança); Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (2021); Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists (forthcoming 2023).

Dr Annelies Schulte Nordholt is Senior Lecturer in Modern French Literature and Culture at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. She holds degrees in Philosophy and French and a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. A specialist of Maurice Blanchot, she published on his criticism and fiction, focusing on their aesthetic and ethical dimension. European Modernism and the question of literary creativity is another research area of hers, especially in the work of Proust. Holocaust memory in French and French-Jewish literature is her third research area, particularly in the work of second-generation authors and child survivors. Her current research is on Paris urban space as a carrier of personal and collective memory in the work of Georges Perec. Forthcoming: Georges Perec et ses lieux de mémoire. Le projet de Lieux (Brill, Faux Titre, 2022).

Prof. Claire Zalc is a CNRS Research Director and teaches also at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She is the author of Face à la persécution. 991 Juifs dans la guerre, with Nicolas Mariot (2010), of Melting Shops. Une histoire des commerçants étrangers en France (2010) and, with Tal Bruttmann, Ivan Ermakoff and Nicolas Mariot, the editor of Pour une microhistoire de la Shoah (Seuil, 2012). She is on the editorial board of the journals French Politics, Culture and Society, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, and Le Mouvement social. Her research focuses on immigration, persecutions, and micro-history. She is the Principal Investigor of a major ERC-funded project which investigates the transnational trajectories of the Jews of Lubartów (1920s-1950s).

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Invited Early Career Scholars

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Dr Luc-André Brunet is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary International History at The Open University, where he also directs the Centre for War and Peace in the Twentieth Century. He earned his PhD in International History from LSE and has held post-doctoral and visiting fellowships at LSE, the EUI, Sciences Po (Paris) and Cambridge.  His first book, Forging Europe: Industrial Organisation in France, 1940-1952 (2017) explores Franco-German economic collaboration from the Fall of France to the early stages of European integration. His current research project focuses on the foreign policy of Vichy France, particularly its relations with the members of the British Commonwealth during the Second World War.

Dr Ayshka Sené is a Research Associate at the University of York on the Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Archiving the Inner City Project: Race and the Politics of Urban Memory.’ Her research focuses on British women interned in France during WWII, in particular the intergenerational transmission of memory and the intersection of these familial accounts with national memories and myths in popular culture. She is also interested in national identity and belonging in France, and has produced a podcast on disease, contagion and confinement in France’s overseas penal colonies (‘Podcasts from the bagne’) and a MOOC on the memory of conflict and violence in 20th-century Europe.

Dr Rebekah Vince is a lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London, specialising in French postmemory narratives and the Mediterranean francosphère, with a particular focus on Jewish-Muslim interactions. Before joining Queen Mary in 2020, she was a teaching fellow in French at Durham University and an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, where she completed her PhD in 2018. She is editor of the bilingual journal Francosphères and co-editor (with Hanna Teichler) of the new book series Mobilizing Memories, published by Brill. She has translated several short stories from Une enfance juive en Méditerranée musulmane.