Joan Tumblety

I am a historian of modern France, specialising in the entwined cultural, gender and political histories of the twentieth century. Although I began my career focusing on the cultural and gender politics of the far right, my current research draws on perspectives from the history of health and medicine to explore natural health cures and the emergence of self-help across the early to mid-twentieth century period.

I first explored the interrelation of gender and politics in my doctoral research on fascist writers during the Occupation of France, 1940-1944. I was struck by how systematically parts of the collaborationist press filtered and refined their political and historical views through notions of masculinity and femininity. I expanded this engagement with masculinity by exploring the imagined connection between national decline and male physical failure in a monograph about the world of French physical culture, 1918-1945. My doctoral studies also nurtured a scholarly interest in the instrumentalization of memory, and this resulted in the publication of an edited collection for Routledge in 2013.