Professor Julian Jackson, FBA
Professor of Modern French History
Location: Arts Two 3.07email: j.t.jackson@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7882 8360
Professor Jackson is on Leverhulme research leave in 2012-13
Professor Julian Jackson took his first degree at Cambridge University where he also did his doctoral research. His PhD, awarded in 1982, was a study of the impact of the Great depression of the 1930s on French politics. Ever since then he has devoted most of his writing and research to the history of France in the twentieth century.
As one of the country’s leading historians of French history, his contribution to the subject was recognised by his election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. His book on the Fall of France in 1940 won the Wolfson History Prize in 2004. His previous book on the German occupation of France was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize. His work has been translated into many languages. In 2009 the French government awarded him the honour of Commandeur dans les Palmes Academiques.
Research interests:
Professor Jackson’s research focuses on three main areas:
- He has written extensively on the major political and social crisis which hit France in the 1930s, and culminated in the defeat of 1940 and the German Occupation. His work on the Occupation is now considered to be the standard history of the subject, and one of its aim was to integrate cultural, social and political history.
- He has also written about the life and career of Charles de Gaulle, both in the war and after it. He is particularly interested by the myth of de Gaulle. His work in this area led him to be invited to join the Conseil Scientifique of the Fondation Charles de Gaulle in Paris, and he is currently embarking on a major new political biography of de Gaulle to be published by Penguin Press.
- He is also interested in the 'events' of May 1968 in France and in 2008 he organised an international conference on May 68 in Paris, at the University London Institute of Paris (ULIP) which is linked to Queen Mary. The proceedings of this conference will be published in 2011 with Palgrave MacMillan.
- He has also recently been working on the history of homosexuality in post war France and this has resulted in his most recent publication:
Living in Arcadia. Homosexuality, Politics and Homosexuality in France from the Liberation to Aids (Chicago University Press, 2009), in French, Arcadie : La vie homosexuelle en France, de l'après-guerre à la dépénalisation (Broché, 2009)
A video interview with Professor Jackson on the book can be found here (in French).
His other most recent publication is La Grande Illusion (BFI Film Classics, 2009)
You can download a podcast of Professor Jackson's 2010 Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture for the Society for the Study of French History entitled 'The Century of Charles de Gaulle' here.
Postgraduate supervision:
At present Professor Jackson has five PhD students. They are working on the following subjects: the Algerian community in Marseilles between 1962 and 1983; the way in which the intellectual consensus in France between the 1960s and the 1990s moved from 'tiers-mondisme' to 'liberal interventionism'; Frenchs views of the British at the end of the nineteenth century; the wine industry of the Langeudoc and regional identity 1907-2007; and folklore and politics in France between 1870 and 1914.
Recently one of his student completed a thesis on women and the Algerian War and another (co-supervised) completed a thesis on sexological writing at the start of the nineteenth century in Italy and Britain.
Professor Jackson is ready to consider supervising a wide range of topics on the history of modern and contemporary France.
Publications:
Living in Arcadia. Homosexuality, Politics and Morality in France from the Liberation to Aids (Chicago University Press, 2009)
La Grande Illusion (BFI Film Classics, 2009)
The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy 1934-1938 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
'De Gaulle and May 1968' in Hugh Gough and John Horne, De Gaulle and Twentieth Century France, Edward Arnold, 1994, 125-146
'General de Gaulle and his Enemies: Anti-Gaullism in France since 1940', Transactions of The Royal Historical Society, sixth series, xi(1999), 43-65.
France: the Dark Years 1940-1944 ( Oxford University Press, 2001).
The Fall of France (Oxford University Press, 2003).
De Gaulle (Haus Publishing, 2003)
The Short Oxford History of Europe 1900-1945 (editor) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
‘Sex, Politics and Morality in France’, History Workshop Journal 61 (May 2006), pp 77-102.
Undergraduate teaching:
Europe since 1890
From the Dreyfus Affair to the Algerian War: Intellectuals and Politics in Modern France, 1898-1962 (Level 2)
The Fall of France (Third Year Special Subject)