Contact Details

Telephone: +44 (0) 1243 816200

Office: New Hall, N122

Email: h.frey@chi.ac.uk

Hugo Frey is Head of the Department of History. He holds a BA (Hons) in History with English Literature, an MA in European Area Studies (Surrey, 1992) and a PhD in Contemporary French History (Surrey, 1998).

My current research is focused on modern and contemporary cultural history, with particular interest in the politics of visual culture in France and Belgium. In 2004, Manchester University Press published my study of the filmmaker Louis Malle. It remains the first and only English language monograph devoted to the important director of Lacombe Lucien, Atlantic City USA, and Au revoir les enfants. Following that project my recent research explores the politics of nationalism in French cinema, from the late 1930s to the present day. This is being published in the book, Made in France: Cinema, Nationalism and Identity Crisis (Reaktion Books, forthcoming 2012). In the future, I would like to further underline the importance of sometimes less fashionable filmmakers, such as Malle, but also, Pascal Thomas, Claude Lelouch, Jacques Rozier and Claude Sautet.

Other recent publications have focussed on comics and graphic novels and how they reflect historical and political themes. These include the article, ‘For All to See’ Yvan Alagbé’s Nègres jaunes and the Representation of the Contemporary Social Crisis in the Banlieue’, Yale French Studies, Number 114 (2008). My essay about Tintin for the collection History and Politics in French Language Comics, edited by Mark Mckinney in 2008, has become a widely discussed piece, prompting an extensive article in the Belgian newspaper, Le Soir. With Jan Baetens, I am researching and writing The Graphic Novel (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2014).

I am an editorial board member of the journal European Comic Art and a member of the ‘Conseil Scientifique International’ of Études Francophones (University of Louisiana, at Lafayette). I am also editor in chief of a series of research monographs being published by Leuven University Press/Cornell that focus on European comics and graphic novels.

In parallel to the above research I have also continued to publish on the politics of history writing in France, the subject of my doctorate. In the period 2005-2010 I have worked with the NHIST European Science Foundation funded research project on national history-writing. As part of that collaboration I published three essays in comparative history with Dr Stefan Jordan (Bavarian Academy of Science, Munich) on French and German nationalist historians (1870-1950). These are published in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., The Contested Nation (Palgrave 2008); Carine Germond and Henning Türk, eds., A History of Franco-German Relations in Europe (Palgrave 2008); and in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (Palgrave, 2010). 2010 has also seen the publication of analysis of the work of Henry Rousso in the collection, French Historians, 1900-2000 (Blackwell, 2010). 

M/Phil PhD supervision

I would be pleased to supervise doctoral students in the areas of French/Francophone history, Francophone or North American comics and graphic novels, cinema history, national identity, national historiography, and the politics of culture.

Undergraduate teaching

• Rethinking History (Year 1)

 

• Paris vs Hollywood: The Politics of National Identity and Cinema in France (Year 1)

 

• Approaches to Research (Year 2)

 

• Microhistories of postwar Britain and USA (Year 2)

 

• War, Memory and Political Culture (Year 3)

 

• History in the Graphic Novel (Year 3)

 

• Vichy France: Resistance and Collaboration (Year 3)

 

Publications

books

• History: 101 Key Ideas (London and Chicago: Hodder-Arnold 2002).
  Pbk. ISBN 0340845406.

 

• Louis Malle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004).
  Hbk. ISBN 0719064562.; Pbk. ISBN 0719064570.

 

• Made in France: Cinema, Nationalism and Identity Crisis (Reaktion, forthcoming 2012).

Edited collections

• ‘History in the Graphic Novel’, a special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 6.3 (2002): 255-377. [co-editor]

 

•  ‘Reactionary Times’ special double issue, Journal of European Studies Vol. 37:3-4 (Autumn and Winter 2007): 241-447. [co-editor]

 

• ‘National Identity and Comics’, European Comic Art, 1.2 (Autumn 2009): 111-217 [co-editor]

Articles

• “The Vichy Syndrome Revisited”, [co-author with C.Flood], Contemporary French Civilization, 19.2 (1995): 231-249.

 

• “Questions of Decolonization and Post-Colonialism in the Ideology of the French Extreme Right”, [co-author with C.Flood], Journal of European Studies- Literature and ideas from the renaissance to the present, 28.1/2 (1998): 69-88.

 

• “Extreme Right-Wing Reactions to Charles de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre: A Scene from the French Civil War”, [co-author with C.Flood], South Central Review. The Journal of the South Central MLA, 17.4 (Winter 2000): 72-83.

 

•  “History and Memory in the Franco-Belgian Bande Dessinée”, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 6.3 (2002) (Routledge): 293-304.

 

• “Contagious Colonial Diseases in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin”, Modern and Contemporary France NS 12.2 (2004): 177-188.

 

•  “Céline, Hergé et l’Affaire Haddock: The Consequences of a Literary Scandal”, Études Francophones 20.1 (Spring 2005) (Université de Louisiane): 59-72.

 

• “Contagious Colonial Diseases in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin”, Children’s Literature Review, Vol 114 (2006), 45-54. Re-printing of the original article first published in Modern and Contemporary France (2004).

 

• “Louis Malle and the 1950s: Ambiguities, Friendships and Legacies”, South Central Review: Journal of the South Central MLA 23.2 (June 2006): 22-35.

 

• “Paul Sérant and the Extreme Right’s Rhetoric of Antithesis”, Journal of European Studies (Winter 2007) 37.4: 373-389.

 

• “Trafic d’Outre-Manche: réflexion sur Une trilogie anglaise de Floc’h et Rivière”, Lendemains: Études comparées sur la France, Vol 33. No 129 (2008): 43-60.

 

• “For All to See: Yvan Alagbé’s Nègres jaunes and the Contemporary French Social Crisis”, Yale French Studies, 114 (Winter 2008), 116-129.

Chapters in collections

• “Rebuilding France: Gaullist Historiography, the Rise-Fall Myth and French Identity (1945-1958)”, in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), 205-216.

 

• “Historical Memory and the Boundaries of European Integration”, in Noel Parker and William Armstrong (eds), Margins in European Integration (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000), 230-246.

 

• “History Writing: From the Annales to the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent”,[co-author with C.Flood], in Christopher Flood and Nick Hewlett (eds), Currents in Contemporary French Intellectual Life (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000), 56-75.

 

• “Defending the Empire in Retrospect: the Viewpoint of the Extreme Right”, [co-author with C.Flood] in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (eds), Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 195-211.

 

• “Questions of Decolonization and Post-Colonialism in the Ideology of the French Extreme Right”, [co-author with C.Flood] in James D.Le Sueur (ed) The Decolonization Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 399-413.

 

• “Drieu La Rochelle, Louis Malle and the Ambiguous Memory of French Fascism” in William Kidd and Brian Murdoch (eds), Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 220-232.

 

• “Afterword: The Place of Pierre Benoit and the Lessons of L’Atlantide,” in Pierre Benoit, The Queen of Atlantis (London and Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 289-308.

 

• “Shutting Out the City: Reflections on the Portrayal of London in 1960s Auteur Cinema” in Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber (eds) London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2007), 135-148.

 

• “National Historians and the Discourse of the ‘Other’: France and Germany”, [co-author with S.Jordan] in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 200-230.

 

• “Traditions of Hate among the Intellectual Elite: the case of Heinrich von Treitschke and Jacques Bainville” [co-author with S.Jordan] in Carine Germond and Henning Turk (eds) A History of Franco-German Relations in Europe, from ‘Hereditary Enemies’ to Partners (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 103-111.
  
  

• “Cannes ‘56/‘79: Riviera Reflections on Cinema and National Identity,” in Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock (eds), Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts (Oxford: and New York, Berghahn, 2008), 181-203.

 

• “Trapped in the Past: the Persistence of Anti-Semitism in Hergé’s Flight 714” in Mark Mckinney (ed) History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 34-51.

 

• “Contradiction Without End: Renaud Camus and the Parti de l’In-nocence” in Ralph Sarkonak (ed) Les Spirales du sens chez Renaud Camus (Amsterdam and Paris: Rodopi Editions, 2009), 207-231.

 

• “Henry Rousso,” [co-author with C. Flood] in Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (eds) French Historians, 1900-2000: New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2010), 545-555.

 

• “Inside-out: questions of form in the work of Friedrich Meinecke and Robert Aron,” [co-author with S. Jordan] in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation-Builders (forthcoming, Palgrave, November 2010), 282-297.

Review articles and shorter writings

• “Dominique Venner: Arms and the Man”, Modern and Contemporary France, NS 4.4 (1996), 509-512.

 

• “French Right-Wing Terrorism”, in Martha Crenshaw and John Pimlott (eds), Encyclopaedia of Terrorism, Vol.3 (New York: ME Sharpe, 1997), 560.

 

• “Un collabo et son bon juif?”, Modern and Contemporary France, NS 6.3(1998), 373-376.

 

• “Actualités. Tintin: the Extreme Right-Wing and the Seventieth Anniversary Debates”, Modern and Contemporary France, NS 7.3 (August 1999), 361-363.

 

• “Course Delivery and Teaching Methods”, [co-author with C.Rodrigues and J.Williams], in Hans-Peter Baumeister, John Williams and Kevin Wilson (eds), Teaching Across Frontiers: A Handbook for International Online Seminars (Tübingen: Deutsches Institut für Fernstudienforschung an der Universität Tübingen, 2000), 79-94.

 

• “Constructing a European Curriculum: some Reflections on the CEFES project”, in Hans-Peter Baumeister, John Williams and Kevin Wilson (eds), Teaching Across Frontiers: A Handbook for International Online Seminars (Tübingen: Deutsches Institut für Fernstudienforschung an der Universität Tübingen, 2000), 95-102.

 

• ‘Michael Haneke’, ‘Werner Herzog’, ‘Fritz Lang’ and ‘Wim Wenders’ in Holger Briel (ed), German Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary (London: Arnold/ New York: OUP, 2002), 63; 64-65; 83; 144-145.

 

• “Computers, the Internet and Teaching and Learning in Area Studies”,Web Guide to Good Practice in Teaching and Learning in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (2002) Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, University of Southampton, England. www.soton.ac.uk

 

• The Silent World (Cousteau/Malle, 1956); Phantom India (Malle, 1969) in Stephen Aitken (ed) The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Documentary Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1041-42, 1224-1226.

 

• “Louis Malle and the Historians”, in Blackwell’s History Compass 3.3 (2005), 1-5.

 

• “R.G.Collingwood,” in Stefan Jordan and Burkhard Mojsisch (eds) Philosophenlexicon (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009), 83-4.

Conference papers

I have presented thirty five research papers in numerous universities and conferences including in: Amsterdam, Birmingham, Bergen, The Citadel (Charleston, South Carolina) London, Lexington, Manchester, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) Purdue (West Lafayette, Indiana), St Louis (Missouri), Stirling, and Texas A&M. I have given guest classes at University of Lousiana, Lafayette, and at Louisiana State University (LSU), Baton Rouge, to students of French, film studies and history. At KUL Leuven, Belgium, I have taught on the undergraduate programme on literary/cultural history.

Grants and prizes

• 1992, The Conrad Tipping History Prize for the undergraduate dissertation, The Right-Wing and the Dreyfus Affair: the Anti-Semitic Riots of Poitiers, France, 1898.

 

• 1993-1996, Three year ‘Surrey Scholarship’ cross University award for doctoral research of the highest calibre.

 

• 2004-2007, Invited and fully funded member of NHIST research group, team 2, ‘National Identity, Historiography and its others’, sponsored by the European Science Foundation. Meetings attended at University of Glamorgan (2004); Geneva, Chateau Coppet (2005); Munich (2005); University of Manchester (2006). Three papers are published from this collaboration, Frey (2008); Frey and Jordan (2008) and Frey and Jordan (2009).

 

• 2007, Primary Convener/Host of International Bande Dessinée Society 2007 Conference in collaboration with University of Glasgow and the French Institute. South Kensington, London, April 13-14 2007. 40 delegates from 10 nations. Funding support from French Embassy London, Alliance Française de Glasgow, Liverpool University Press, University of Glasgow and University of Chichester.

 

• 2007, Invited and funded guest lecturer at LSU (Baton Rouge) and University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

 

• 2008, British Academy Award, International Conference Grant, awarded to present paper at 61st Kentucky Modern Languages Annual Conference. 

 

• 2009, EU Erasmus Staff Research Exchange: Funded 10 hours teaching in Department of Cultural Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.