The Future of World War Two France in Academia: Contemporary Research Paradigms, Intellectual Trajectories, and Challenges

This book examines the intellectual trajectories of international mid-career scholars working on the Second World War and the Holocaust in France across a wide range of disciplines, including history, literature, and cultural studies. It scrutinises disciplinary and interdisciplinary dynamics, and explores the conceptual frameworks within which the contributors have developed their research. The volume considers how dominant narratives on France, the Holocaust and Vichy are reconfigured or challenged by emerging lines of enquiry, and how these are shaped both by recent academic ‘turns’—through shifts in focus to post-memorial, spatial, affective and digital approaches—and by rapidly evolving academic contexts. The different contributors, from France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK, also offer critical reflections on how positionality—particularly in terms of gender, ethnicity, class and identity—informs academic research, thereby providing new insights into the role of subjectivity in the production of knowledge.