French, History, and Blogging: Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of the FHN

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the French History Network blog, we are gathering a roundtable of French historians who have either participated in one way or another in the FHN over the years, or who have used digital spaces to connect with other scholars, expand historical research and thinking. What has proven useful from digital space? Is it a space for different kinds of thinking and writing? A way to make connections and build networks? How do you think the digital landscape has changed 2014-2024? What have been the challenges that the FHN has engaged with, and which ones should it address more in the future? The papers will be published as a forum in French History to show the ways in which historians reflect on, use, and engage with digital spaces.

Daniel A. Gordon is Senior Lecturer in European History at Edge Hill University and a member of the organising collective of the Acteurs et mouvements sociaux research seminar at Sciences Po Paris. He has taught at the Universities of Sussex, Nice, Oxford, Oldenburg, Rouen and Liverpool John Moores, and his articles have appeared in the journals French History, Past and Present, Migrations Société, Modern and Contemporary France, Vingtième Siècle, the Journal of Contemporary History, Labour History Review, Migrance, Dissidence, Contemporary European History, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, H-France Salon, the International Strategic Studies Forum, Historiens et Géographes and Teaching History. He has blogged about every French presidential election since 2002, and is the author of the French History Network Blog’s most read (yet probably longest!) blogposts, having also blogged for the FHN on the Calais refugee crisis; Brexit; France’s ten year residency law of 1984; the life of Jacques Sauvageot; not doing things; going digital as an analogue historian; and imagining Sisyphus happy.

Laura O’Brien (she/her) is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her research interests span visual culture, theatre and cinema, revolution, memory, and religion. She currently spends a lot of time thinking about people pretending to be Napoleon for a project on Napoleonic performance in French theatre and cinema. Her most recent publication based on this research, 'The Musée Napoléonien: objects, performance, and encountering the "spectacular past" in the long nineteenth century', appeared in the "Moving Objects" special issue of French History in December 2023.

Will Pooley is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Bristol. His research interests focus on folklore and more recently witchcraft in France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. He has worked with creative practitioners on collaborative projects that use poetry and theatre as history, and he has an overdue book to finish which is a history of witchcraft in France from 1790-1940. His interests in history blogging and social media date back to 2013, when he started his first blog, which is still going.

Guillaume Yverneau is professeur agrégé in history. He is currently a doctoral candidate in contemporary history at the University of Caen and Cardiff University. His work focuses on relations between the British military and the civilian population during the Liberation of France (1944-1948). He is the co-host of the historical research podcast ‘Plumes de doctorant.es’: (https://plumes-de-doctorant-es.lepodcast.fr/).

Alison Carrol is a historian of Modern Europe at Brunel University. She is interested in the history of borders, borderlands, nationhood, and what it means to belong in modern Europe. Her first monograph The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939 was published in 2018, whilst her current research focuses on the long history of the Channel tunnel. This was inspired by the question of where our ideas about borders come from. Her research has appeared in numerous publications and journals including French History, Contemporary European History, and most recently The Historical Journal. She co-founded the French History Network in 2014.