Lindsey Dodd

7 Last updated  24 January 2023

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Lindsey Dodd is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Huddersfield. Her research interests include France during the Second World War, oral history theory and practice, children in war, the history of childhood and the history of everyday life. She is also interested in the emotions of history, and the way that affect theory can be deployed in historical practices. She leads the Feelings, Affects and Emotions research group in the Centre for History, Culture and Memory.

She joined the history department in January 2012. During the academic year 2018-2019, Lindsey was a Research Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon, the School of Advanced Studies at the Université de Lyon in France.

Lindsey gained a First Class Honours degree in History with French and European Studies from the University of Sussex in 2000, and an MA in Life History Research: Oral History and Mass Observation, also at Sussex. Her MA dissertation was on working-class grammar school girls in the 1950s, and used oral history to examine the cultural and social reproduction of class and gender through the grammar school system. In 2007 she began a PhD in the French Department at the University of Reading, supervised by Professor Andrew Knapp and Dr Martin Parsons. Her research formed part of the ‘outstanding’ AHRC-funded project ‘Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe, 1940-1945’, involving the Universities of Reading, Exeter and Newcastle. The project looked comparatively at air war in France, Italy, Germany and the UK. She was awarded her doctorate in 2011.

Exploring the ‘hidden history’ of being bombed as a French child in the Second World War, Lindsey's first monograph French Children Under the Allied Bombs, France 1940-45: An Oral History (Manchester University Press, 2016) was described as ‘engrossing’ and ‘fascinating’. She is currently working on a second book provisionally entitled Feeling Memory which pulls together 120 oral histories of French wartime childhoods – children bombed, evacuated, hunted as Jews, imprisoned, bereaved, separated from families, but also children safe at home, studying, playing and growing up – which deepens her work on subjectivity and history, memory and memorial cultures, emotion and affect, and childhood trauma. Lindsey has co-edited three works: Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime (Bloomsbury, 2018; with David Lees); a special issue of the Australian journal Essays in French Literature and Culture (no 54, 2017; with Wendy Michallat) called ‘Hidden words, hidden worlds: everyday life and narrative sources (France 1939-1945)’; and a special issue of Oral History called 'Power and the Archive' (49.2, 2021; with Anindya Raychaudhuri). She has also published on the instrumentalization of children by the Vichy regime, children separated from parents, evacuation in wartime France, children's bereavement, as well as on affect and oral history.

Both Lindsey’s MA and PhD were funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2015 she was part of a small early-career team (Huddersfield, Leeds, Sheffield) funded via the AHRC’s Care for the Future: Thinking Forward Through the Past theme: ‘Agents of future promise: the ideological use of children in culture and politics (Britain and France, c.1880-c.1950)’ (https://childrenofthefuture.leeds.ac.uk/). In 2016, she was awarded AHRC funding for a Franco-British interdisciplinary project called ‘Disrupted histories, recovered pasts: a cross-disciplinary analysis and cross-case synthesis of oral histories and history in post-conflict and postcolonial contexts’ (https://dsrupdhist.hypotheses.org/). Working with French scholars from the Labex Passé dans le present (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense), and UK-based colleagues (Bath Spa), this funding has enabled Lindsey to broaden her data base of oral histories of wartime childhoods – as well as write, think, collaborate, publish and disseminate her work.

With her commitment to the value and power of oral history, as well as longstanding connections to the international oral history community, Lindsey has been on the editorial team of Oral History since 2015. She regularly reviews and edits articles for this independent journal, and takes a full part it its biannual production process. 

• Social and cultural history
• French studies
• Oral history
• History of childhood
• War studies