Julie Gottlieb, Visiting Fellowship 2023/24

Biography

Julie V. Gottlieb is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has written extensively on the history of women and politics in Britain, including monographs Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923-1945 (2001, new edition 2021), ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Interwar Britain (2015), and many edited collections and articles. Her current research focuses on the mental health fallout in Britain of the international crisis and the coming of the Second World War. She was awarded a Wellcome Seed Award for ‘Suicide, Society and Crisis’ (2018-19), and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for ‘Britain’s War of Nerves, 1938-40: Mass Psychology and the Crisis Suicide.’

Visiting Fellowship September 2024

Motivation

The purpose of my visit will be to work closely with Dr Meta Remec, a member of the Institute of Contemporary History, giving us the opportunity to share our research on the history of suicide, and develop new collaborations moving forward. I came to know Dr Remec in 2018 when she participated in my Wellcome-funded international symposium on ‘Suicide, Society and Crisis’ at the University of Sheffield. We quickly discovered that there were fascinating overlaps and synergies in our receptive research projects. I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Dr Remec’s project Sin, shame, symptom: suicide and its perceptions in Slovenia (1850-2000), funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (Research Core Funding No. J6-3123).

My visit in September 2024 will be to actively participate in the ‘Sin, Shame and Suicide’ (10-11 September) conference organised in the framework of the research project; present my own research on the ‘crisis suicides’—an apparent epidemic of suicides in Britain from 1938 to 1940 triggered by fear of the war to come and the outbreak of war; and work with Dr Meta and her colleagues to plan follow on projects and funding bids. I will also present my collaborative research project on “The Nervous State”, and the dramatization by Nicola Baldwin – first as a play and now a film—of F.L. Lucas’s Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (1939), as the themes are directly pertinent to our shared research interests. I am especially keen to discuss mutual research interests with other member of the Institute on the impact of international events and diplomatic decisions on the public opinion, emotions, and perception of crisis.