Ludivine Broch

Born in France, raised in Pittsburgh and Paris and having studied and settled in the UK, I am a historian who specialises in society and culture in Second World War France. I am interested in peoples' lives during this period, their thoughts, feelings and the objects which surrounded them. I was awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2010 for my doctoral thesis, funded by the AHRC, on the role of French railway workers during the German Occupation of France (1940-44). I then taught at Birkbeck and the University of Bristol, and was awarded an Early Career Research Fellowship at the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck and a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. In September 2014, I joined the University of Westminster where I teach on a range of topics relating to 19th and 20th century European but also global history. I coordinate the Humanities Programme Coordinator for Study Abroad and Summer Schools, and am heavily involved in Outreach.

Over the years my research on twentieth-century France and the world wars has been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy-Leverhulme, the SSFH-ASMCF, and the Westminster-Smithsonian Partnership Development Fund. My work has appeared in journals including French History; Contemporary European History; French Politics, Culture and Society; Diasporas. At the moment I am finishing a project with Professor Martin Sorrell to contextualise and translate the memoirs of the Italian anti-fascist resister Francesco Fausto Nitti, under contract with Pen&Sword. My current research on the French Gratitude Train sent to Americans in 1949 has already been published in several outlets and I am now writing a monograph, MERCI! and getting involved in public engagement projects with the Smithsonian in Washington D.C..

I am actively engaged in the wider academic field as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society; co-convenor for the Modern French History seminar at the IHR; co-founder of the French History Network; Conference Officer of the Society for the Study of French History; an associate fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the study of Antisemitism. I am on the Editorial Boards of the UCL Booc Paper Trails, the ‘Global France’ series with Palgrave Macmillan, and a Board Member of Contemporary European History.