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.

Fransiska Louwagie is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her research examines literary testimony of the Holocaust and representations of memory. She co-edited Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (Palgrave, 2018) and is the author of Témoignage et littérature d’après Auschwitz (2020).

 Manuel Bragança is an Associate Professor of French Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. His research focuses on the memories of the Second World War in France and Europe. He co-edited Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (Palgrave, 2018) and is the author of Hitler's French Literary Afterlives (Palgrave, 2019).