Daniel Lee

 Daniel Lee: I am a historian of the Second World War and a specialist in the history of Jews in France and North Africa during the Holocaust. My first book, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–42 (OUP, 2014) explored the coexistence between young French Jews and the Vichy regime. My second book, The SS Officer's Armchair (Jonathan Cape, 2020), examines the life of a low-ranking SS officer from Stuttgart whose personal documents were recently discovered sewn into the cushion of an armchair. I am concurrently working on a history of the Jews of Tunisia during the Second World War, and am also the Principal Investigator on a British Academy GCRF Sustainable Development Programme project entitled, “Traces of Jewish Memory in Contemporary Tunisia”.

I was an undergraduate at Sussex in History and French and completed an M.St and a DPhil in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. After completing my doctorate, I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford. I have held fellowships at the European University Institute (Max Weber Fellow), Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Before moving to Queen Mary in September 2019 I was a Vice Chancellor's Fellow in History at the University of Sheffield.

As a 2015 BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, I contribute often to radio.

Twitter: @daniellee550

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

Without doubt “La fille sur le pont” (Girl on the Bridge) with Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis. For anyone who has a tendency to overwrite, and overloads the reader with preliminary detail for fear that s/he will be lost without it, then the opening scenes to this film are a must. I direct all of my students to it. Their introductions usually become much more succinct.  

What period of history do you wish you knew more about?

That’s easy: it’s the sixteenth century. When I was at graduate school, all the best people I knew were studying it. I was so impossibly jealous of their reading groups, debates and seminars. I always felt as though I was missing out. Here I’m not speaking only of the Tudors, but also of the Italian Renaissance, the Portuguese and Ottoman Empire and, of course, early modern France. The works I have read by Natalie Zemon Davis and Lyndal Roper are inspirational.  

Favourite non-reading activity?

People are often surprised to discover my love of football (the real English kind) and of Watford Football Club.

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

Everyday. Anyone who hasn’t is not telling the truth. As the first in my family to go to university, I used to spend more time being plagued by it. Much less so now. I remember as a PhD student first learning the expression from my friend and colleague, Erika Hanna, the brilliant historian of Modern Ireland. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one who had it came as an enormous relief!

Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?

French is definitely my second language. I don’t have any familial connection with France, but I feel in love with twentieth century French history while an undergraduate. After spending more and more time in France, I decided to specialise in French history at graduate school. I finished Oxford in 2011 with a PhD on Jewish Youth in Vichy France. Part of the fieldwork for my dissertation involved interviewing dozens of people in their 80s and 90s in rural parts of southwest France. Many of these people didn’t understand my British/Parisian accent, so I swiftly needed to adapt it to be understood. Even though I can discuss the Second World War in French for hours, I still sometimes struggle with basic household vocab that every French child knows.

Do I think differently in French, and does it influence my writing? Absolutely. It opens up multiple different perspectives, and makes me think about expressions of place and time and word order patterns. I also think a lot about which tense I’m using. These days, most history books in French are written in the present tense. If you’re interested in learning more about this, I can’t recommend enough Alice Kaplan’s 1993 masterpiece, French Lessons.