Background

After a B.A. in History with French and an M.A. in History at Durham University, I moved to Christ Church, Oxford, for a D.Phil. on the French Popular Front. After working as a Special Lecturer at Bristol University and a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church Oxford, I joined the Department of French Studies at Warwick in September 2010.

French History Seminar series, 2011–12 (jointly organized with Dr Chris Pearson)

Research interests

• My research focuses on modern French politics and culture, and particularly on the relationship between the two. My recent monograph, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–39 explores the battle between left and right to organise the people as political actors, and to imagine them as a community. Analysing the demonstrations, festivals, strikes, and mass meetings of these troubled years, it also charts the imagination of a new mass politics to transcend party and parliament, and suggests a hidden community of thought beneath very real political differences.
• The problem of imagining the people is addressed in a broader scale in the book I am currently completing, a study of popular theatre in the years 1870–1940. Here, I trace the uneven fortunes of state initiatives to create and finance a national popular theatre and to depict the republican people on stage, and the concurrent vitality of popular theatre among regionalists, anarchists, socialists, communists and royalists, among others. I have recently been interviewed by BBC Radio 3 ('Europe: the Art of Austerity', 12 June 2011) about some of these theatrical initiatives, notably Jean-Richard Bloch's Naissance d'une cité, a mass spectacle of 1937.
• The search for utopian communities is similarly discussed in my work on intellectuals and Europe, which has focused in particular on the Paris-based periodical Europe during the interwar years. I have worked as a visiting researcher at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and contributed to a volume on Homo Europeaus; I have also been a member of the DFG-AHRC funded research network on ‘Europeanisation and History’, for which I coordinated a study of intellectual dissidents and Europe in the twentieth century.
• My research interests also encompass the history of the French right, particularly right-wing culture and satire. In 2005 I organised an interdisciplinary workshop at the Maison Française d’Oxford on the theme of ‘Paris and the Right’, and edited the resulting volume. My current research explores the uses of film and theatre by the interwar right, and the development of right-wing satire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France.

Teaching interests

• My teaching interests are in modern French history, especially street politics, popular theatre, and the development of the right. Together with Jerry Ahearne, I teach FR113 Modern and Contemporary France. I am also responsible for the following second-year and final-year TiFFC modules: The crowd in French politics and imagination, 1870–1945; The right in France from the Dreyfus Affair to Le Pen; Popular theatre and political utopia in France, 1890-1940, and Anarchist culture in Belle Epoque Paris, 1880–1914.

Publications

Books

• Jessica Wardhaugh (ed.), Paris and the Right in the Twentieth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2007), 248 p.
• Jessica Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 300 p.

Journal articles

• Jessica Irons, ‘Staging reconciliation: popular theatre and political utopia in France in 1937’, Contemporary European History 14.3 (2005), pp. 279–94
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Between Parliament and the people: the problem of representation in France, 1934–39’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation/Parlements, États et Représentation 27 (2007), pp. 207–226
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Un Rire nouveau: Action Française and the art of political satire’, French History 22.1 (2008), pp. 74–93
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Fighting for the Unknown Soldier: the contested territory of the French nation in 1934–38’, Modern and Contemporary France 15.2 (2007), pp. 185–201
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Parisian stars under a Provençal sky: the Théâtre d’Orange and the Making of Mediterranean Identity’, Nottingham French Studies (forthcoming special issue on L’Invention du Midi, 2011)

Book chapters

• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Fighting for the streets of Paris during the Popular Front, 1934–38’ in Wardhaugh, Paris and the Right, pp. 43–63
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Popular theatre and revolutionary identity: anarchist and communist culture in Paris, 1900–34’ in Roger Spalding and Alyson Brown (eds), Entertainment, Leisure, and Identities (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2007), pp. 96–111
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Europäer erschaffen: die Rolle der Zeitschrift Europe - Revue Mensuelle, 1923–1939’ in Kiran Patel, Veronika Lipphardt, Lorraine Bluche (eds), Der Europäer – ein Konstrukt. Wissenbestände, Diskurse, Praktiken (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009), pp. 97–117
• Jessica Wardhaugh, Christian Bailey and Ruth Leiserowitz, ‘Intellectual dissidents and the construction of European spaces, 1918–1988’ in Kiran Patel and Martin Conway (eds) Europeanization in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming)
• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Salvation, satire, and solidarity: right-wing culture in interwar France’ in Sean Kennedy and Samuel Kalman (eds), The French Right between the wars (forthcoming)

 Review articles

• Jessica Wardhaugh, ‘Sacred Unions: religion and reconciliation in French society, 1919–1945’, French Politics, Culture, and Society 27.3 (2009) pp. 116–28

I have also reviewed books for Modern and Contemporary France, French History, The English Historical Review, Social and Cultural History, and The European History Quarterly and Theatre Survey. I am currently the Society News editor for French History.