My research and scholarship focus on Jewish life in France before, during, and after the Second World War. I am particularly interested in social relations, gender issues, politics, shortages, and children’s experiences in times of crisis. I also engage with different methodological approaches including oral history, geography and mapping, and anthropology. My approach to topics often incorporates both the public and the private, using daily life as a lens to examine key themes in the historiography of war and genocide while offering new perspectives.
Books
Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France 1942-1947. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009 (paperback 2011).
–Winner 2009 Missouri Conference on History Best Book Award
Book chapters
“Beaucoup de mères ne veulent pas se séparer de leurs enfants: Les limites de l’aide apportée aux enfants par l’American Friends Service Committee dans la France de Vichy” in Enfants “sans famille” dans les guerres du 20ème siècle, ed. Laura Hobson-Faure, Antoine Rivière and Manon Pignot. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2023.
“The Effects of the German ‘Occupation’ on Relief Work in Unoccupied France.” Negotiating the Nazi Occupation of France: Gender, Power, and Memory. Reno, Nevada: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2022.
“France at War: A Country Divided or a Society United?” in The Routledge History of the Second World War edited by Paul Bartrop. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. [invited contribution.] doi: 10.4324/9780429455353-26
“The American Friends Service Committee and Wartime Aid to Families” in Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939-1945 edited by Lindsey Dodd and David Lees. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
“Assimilation and Persecution: An Overview of Attitudes towards Gypsies in France” in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. [Invited contribution.]
“Displaced Persons, Displaced Possessions: The Effects of Spoliation and Restitution on Daily Life in Paris” in War, Exile, Justice and Everyday Life, 1936-1946 edited by Sandra Ott.Reno, Nevada: Center for Basque Studies Press, 2011.
Articles
“Home as a Site of Exclusion: The Nazi Occupation, Housing Shortages, and the Holocaust in France.” Special issue on Housing, Hiding, and the Holocaust in Occupied Europe. Journal of Modern European History 20:2(2022), 167-182. [invited contribution.] DOI: 10.1177/16118944221095134
“The Lure of Gain: Material Shortages and the Spoliation of Homes as Exclusionary Tools in Vichy France.” Perspectives sur l’histoire, la culture et la société française Vol. 26 (2022), 11-27. Special edition: Vichy Revisited: History, Memory and Historiography [invited contribution.]
“A Landscape of Loss: The Furniture Operation and the Geography of Looting and Restitution in Paris, 1942-1946.” Histoire Urbaine 62 (December 2021): 59-78. Special issue of journal: Persécution des juifs et espace urbain Paris 1940-1946 [invited contribution.]
“The Politics of Penury: Shortages as an Exclusionary Tool in Wartime France.” Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Vol. 30 (2015): 210-226 [invited contribution.]
“’Everything Had Ended and Everything Was Beginning Again:’ The Public Politics of Rebuilding Private Homes in Postwar Paris.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28:2(Fall 2014): 277-307.
“’They are Undesirables:’ Local and National Responses to Gypsies during World War II.” Special Edition of French Historical Studies on War, Society, and Culture. 31:2 (Spring 2008): 327-358. doi:10.1215/00161071-2007-024 (On the “Most-Read Articles” list for French Historical Studies, 2016. Voted “most influential article in research and teaching,” Duke University Press, 2016. “Most-Read Articles” list for French Historical Studies, 2017.)
“Refugees and Indifference: The Effects of Shortages on Attitudes towards Jews in France’s Limousin Region.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21:1 (Spring 2007): 31-54. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcm002 (On the “Most-Read Articles” list for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2016.)
“Denunciations, Community Outsiders, and Material Shortages in Vichy France.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Vol. 31 (2003): 271-289.
Review Essays
“’The birth of international Jewish humanitarianism:’ Recent works on American Jews, Politics, and Transnational Aid in the Twentieth Century.” Review of works by Catherine Collomp, Jaclyn Granick, and Laura Hobson Faure. European Journal of Jewish Studies 17 (2023), 1-10. Doi: 10.1163/1872471X-BJA10054
“Contradictions: Contextualizing Social Solidarity and Jewish Exclusion in World War II France” Review of Jacques Sémelin, The Survival of the Jews in France. Invited book forum Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 39:2 (Summer 2021): 257-266.
Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942. Yad Vashem Studies 43:1 (2015): 211-221.
