My academic background is in French history (Research Masters awarded with a distinction, Université Paris-Ouest) and French literature and culture (PhD, QUB). My research spans two main areas:

• French historiography and memories of the Second World War; and
• The links between ideology, fiction and emotions; and my methodology combines cultural history, sociology of reading, narratology, and reader-response criticism, and also includes aspects of linguistics and applied psychology.

As a Research Fellow at the Institute for collaborative Research in the Humanities, I will be investigating memories of the Second World War in contemporary France. 70 years after its end, memories of the Second World War remain vivid across Europe. Often Manichean in the aftermath of the war, more complex and divisive memories emerged and stimulated changes in national historiographies. In France, however, this process was particularly slow: De Gaulle’s assertion that ‘only a fistful of [French] scoundrels’ collaborated with Nazi Germany remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s when a study shattered what had become a very convenient consensus.  In 1972, American historian Robert Paxton published Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1972), Vichy being the town where the French government relocated under German occupation, between 1940 and 1944. His study demonstrated that the ‘French State’, Marshal Pétain’s regime, often exceeded Nazis’ expectations and, to a large extent, collaborated willingly, Vichy’s right-wing ideology bearing many parallels with Fascism and Nazism. Divided before the war, the French went through the war as a divided nation, fighting one another: in effect, WWII was also a civil war for the French. This major turn in French historiography is often called the ‘Paxtonian turn’ or ‘Paxtonian trauma’ and historian Henry Rousso – in The Vichy Syndrome (1987) and in Vichy, an ever-present past (1994) – argued that the French have been obsessed by their past ever since and developed a ‘repetition-compulsion’ behaviour where each simple reference to WWII becomes a national trauma.

My research aims at reassessing to what extent the claim made by Rousso is still valid in contemporary France. In a series of studies (articles, co-edited volumes, talks, seminars) that will focus on political speeches, media discourses, literature and culture, I intend to demonstrate that the French are now led by a serene will to understand a troubled history and not by a pathological, compulsive, and obsessive need to re-enact the past. A better understanding of how the French managed to overcome what was for them both an international and a civil war will bring new insight into how individuals and nations can deal with a divisive and traumatic past.

Key publications

Monograph

• La Crise allemande du roman français, 1945-1949 (Oxford: Peter Lang, ‘Modern French Identities’, 2012)

Articles

• ‘Le Survivant de la Shoah face au texte de fiction: un écran protecteur ou un écran projecteur?’, French Cultural Studies, 23.1 (SAGE : February 2012), pp.79-90;
• ‘Le "bon Allemand" dans le roman français de l’immédiat après-Seconde Guerre mondiale : une erreur de casting?’, Modern & Contemporary France, 18-3  (Routledge : August 2010): pp.329-342; 
• ‘Distinguer appropriation et instrumentalisation de la Résistance’, French Studies Bulletin, 113 (OUP : December 2009): pp.82-84.

Forthcoming

• 'Deconstructing the "good German" in post-WWII French novels, or how to frame the reader’s sympathy', The Good German in European Literature and Culture, ed. by P. O'Dochartaigh & C. Schonfeld (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, June 2013): 6,000 words;
• M. Bragança & P. Tame (eds.), Memories of WWII in post-War Europe: Redefining the Self and the Nation (contracted with Berghahn Books – 2015): co-editor and co-author of the introduction (6,000 words).