Historian awarded prestigious residency to Collegium de Lyon

Dr Lindsey Dodd will continue her oral history research into children’s experiences of the Second World War in France

A HISTORIAN at the University of Huddersfield is providing new insights into the experiences of French children during the Second World War.  Now, Dr Lindsey Dodd has been awarded a prestigious academic residency in France itself, joining international scholars at a school of advanced studies, where she will carry out further research and work on a new book.

For ten months, Dr Dodd will relocate to the Collegium de Lyon, a facility that hosts just 15 fellows every year.  They are awarded a place at the centre, where they have complete freedom to pursue their research, after submitting a detailed proposal that is appraised by an advisory board. 

“The proposal I put forward was a book project which continues the work I have been doing on children’s experiences of the Second World War in France,” said Dr Dodd, a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Huddersfield.  She describes the Collegium de Lyon fellowship as a great opportunity.

She specialises in oral history and has transcribed and analysed large numbers of recordings that are stored in French archives.  She has also received grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council that have enabled her to conduct her own interviews with people who have childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied and Vichy France.  While based in Lyon, she will take the opportunity to add to her material.

“Whenever people contact me I do try to get to see them because I think that if people volunteer to talk to you about their past it’s worth recording, and that will be much easier when I am on the ground in France for 10 months,” said Dr Dodd.

She explained that differing historiographical traditions meant that French historians made much less use of oral sources than their British counterparts.

“French archives have collected a lot of material but it is not being used.  Historians in France have typically been interested in the forms of commemoration and the way that nations remember, and less interested in memory at a personal and individual level,” said Dr Dodd.

This meant that there was a gap that she was able to fill with her work on wartime childhood in France, adopting a subjective approach and drawing almost entirely on oral sources and amateur narratives that are “telling the story from the inside out”.

Dr Dodd’s application for a fellowship at the Collegium was supported by two French heritage organisations.  The first is the Centre de l’histoire de la résistance et de la déportation (the Centre for the History of the Resistance and of Deportation) in Lyon, whose collections Dr Dodd has already made use of.  The second is the Maison des enfants d’Izieu (the children’s home in Izieu), which during the war accommodated refugee children, almost all of whom were Jewish.  In 1944, the home was raided by the Nazis, and all the Jewish children and the adults who cared for them were arrested and deported to their deaths, most of them killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“The location is now dedicated to commemorating that experience and the head of the memorial site has supported my application,” said Dr Dodd.  “The kind of research that I am doing is unusual and experimental because it draws so deeply on ordinary people’s versions of their own pasts.”

The research conducted by Dr Dodd during her fellowship will feed into her teaching at the University of Huddersfield.  She already uses her own material, including translations of oral history interviews, for a third-year module on France during the Second World War.  She also teaches a second-year module titled Growing up in the Past: Oral histories of Childhood and Youth.