Daniel Lee

I joined the history department in September 2015. 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. I have held postdoctoral fellowships at the European University Institute (Max Weber Fellow), Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Before moving to Sheffield I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford.

My research interests are in modern French and modern Jewish history. My first book, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–42 explored the coexistence between young French Jews and the Vichy regime. My research reveals significant exceptions to Vichy’s antisemitic policies, in which the regime’s desire for a reinvigorated youth and the rebirth of the nation, took precedence over its racial laws.

My new research on the experience of Tunisian Jews during the Second World War provides a fascinating microcosm that may be used to analyse Vichy’s colonial and racial ambitions. I seek to explore how antisemitic legislation designed in French North Africa came to affect Jews in Metropolitan France. I also examine the experiences of Tunisian Jewish women. Although all of Tunisia’s 80,000 Jews were subject to Vichy and Nazi discrimination irrespective of their sex, women's experiences emerge as markedly different from those of men.