Dr. Alison Carrol; Visiting Fellowship 2023/24
Biography:
I am Reader in European History at Brunel University London and I am interested in the history of borders, borderlands, nationhood and the centre-periphery relationship in modern Europe. In 2018, my book The Return of Alsace to France 1918-1939 was published by Oxford University Press. This research asked what happened when Alsace returned to French rule after almost fifty years of annexation into the Germany Empire, and traced the various policies that the French government introduced as they attempted to integrate the region, as well as the ways in which these initiatives were adopted, appropriated, resisted and rejected by the population in Alsace. I am now working on a history of the idea of the Channel tunnel. This research is supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and traces plans and schemes for a fixed link between France and Britain back to the first proposal made to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, and asks what these proposals tell us about shifting ideas about borders, connection and belonging during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and draws upon state and civil society records in France, Britain, Switzerland and Belgium.
Visiting fellowship November 2023 and June 2024
Motivation:
I am delighted to be joining the Institute for Contemporary History as a Visiting Fellow, and will use my time in Ljubljana to seed cooperation, to build networks and to foster dialogue that seeks to integrate different European histories. Across my work on borders, I have argued that it is impossible to understand the experiences of distinct borderlands in isolation and I have attempted to compare experiences, to consider the flows of people, goods and ideas that crossed borders, and to understand the ways in which thinking about borders was bound up with wider geopolitical concerns. I have also attempted to bring histories of east and west Europe into conversation, and these aims will underpin my fellowship, which will be split across two stays, first in November 2023 and then in June 2024, I will spend this time scoping joint funding projects in order to develop a collaborative funding application on the theme of borders, nationalism and belonging with colleagues from the Institute. Alongside this scoping, I will also investigate a joint conference panel, and organise reciprocal research presentations at the Institute and at Brunel University London.
Selected Recent Publications:
Alison Carrol, ‘Navigations of National Belonging. Law and the Legal Reintegration of Alsace into France, 1918-1939’ in Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, David Rodogno and Mona Bieling (eds) Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Alison Carrol, ‘Les passages de la frontière franco-allemande en Alsace dans l’entre-deux-guerres,’ in Segolène Plyer (ed.) Frontière et mobilités après 1918 (Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2022)
Alison Carrol, ‘Crossing Borders. The Making of France’s Eastern Frontier in Alsace, 1919-1939,’ French History 35: 1 (2021), 70-91
Alison Carrol ‘Winemaking and the Politics of Identity in Interwar Alsace,’ Contemporary European History, 29: 4 (2020), 380 - 393.
Alison Carrol, ‘Paths to Frenchness. National Indifference and the Return of Alsace to France’ in M. van Ginderachter and J. Fox (eds) National Indifference and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe (Routledge, 2019)
Alison Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2018)
