Research
A historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust in France, I received a PhD in History and French Studies from New York University in 2024. I am interested in how individuals navigated the myriad challenges posed by wartime displacement, anti-Semitic persecution, and their postwar aftermaths. My work takes a micro-historical approach to understanding how “ordinary” people and local administrators interacted as they advocated for their needs and ideas, addressed national policy at the local level, and developed narratives about their actions and experiences. I dig beyond discourse to study the often messy practices and relationships that developed through these processes. A writer at heart, I also study the craft of writing history and experiment with creative forms for sharing my work.
My dissertation, “Fragments of Exile: A Sociopolitical History of Alsatian and Mosellan Expellees in the Basses-Alpes, 1939-1945,” tells the story of four families who were expelled from Alsace-Moselle by German authorities in 1940 and who took refuge in the southeastern Basses-Alpes department (now the Alpes de Haute Provence). I examine how these families, prefectural authorities and members of the local population confronted the material, administrative and personal consequences of exile. I argue that both aiding and disciplining expellees were relational practices that developed from intersecting personal and institutional logics.
This research was generously supported by the Jeanne Marandon Fellowship (Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique, 2018-2019) and several New York University grants and fellowships, including the Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship (2015-2010), the Michel Beaujour Doctoral Fellowship in French Studies (2021), and the Provost’s Global Research Initiative Program in Paris (2019).
A postdoctoral research fellowship from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah enabled me to join the Université de Strasbourg‘s ARCHE research unit as an invited researcher (2024-2025). My project, “L’Expulsion des Juifs alsaciens-mosellans: Une micro-histoire de la mobilité forcée et ses conséquences en France, 1939-1947” expanded on my dissertation to situate German authorities’ 1940 expulsion of approximately 3,000 Alsatian and Mosellan Jews to France’s southern zone as an important phase of anti-Semitic persecution in France.
I am currently transforming this research into a book manuscript.
Also a member of the Connus à cette adresse research collective, I have studied the return of Jewish tenants to Paris after the war, and the conflicts that erupted in the courts and the streets as they attempted to reclaim their former homes. I draw on police reports, trial records, and the archives of several Jewish organizations to explore how the home became an important site of socioeconomic and ideological disputes in the Liberation era. My case study of the Porte Saint Martin neighborhood, in the tenth district, was published as « La réinsertion socioéconomique troublée des Juifs parisiens après la Shoah. Le cas des conflits entre locataires au 66, rue René Boulanger, 1944-1946. » Histoire urbaine 62, no. 1 (Jan 2022): 129 – 144.
Hilary S. Handin 