Women in War

in France, Britain, and Ireland

in the early 20th century

International Conference

Boulogne-sur-Mer​

March 5-6, 2026

Participants

Claire
HORTON CBE

Keynote speaker

Claire Horton CBE has spent over 30 years in the not-for-profit sector, leading significant charities through major transformation programmes. During her career, she has built numerous international partnerships and has worked extensively with governments, both in the UK and globally. Since January 2021, she has been Director General of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the organization responsible for the maintenance and preservation of the graves and memorials of 1.7 million Commonwealth service men and women who died during the First and Second World Wars. The CWGC manages 23,000 sites across 153 countries.

Caitríona
BEAUMONT

Professor Caitríona Beaumont is Professor of Social History at London South Bank University and co-lead of the Lived Citizenship strand for the Building Future Communities Research Centre. Her work explores female activism and women’s social movements in twentieth-century Ireland and Britain. She has published widely on these themes, for example Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-1964 (MUP, 2013). Along with colleagues at universities across Europe she leads on the Afterlives project exploring the lives of women in the wake of revolution and war, 1918 to the present, with related work published in The Conversation (2022) https://theconversation.com/how-a-photograph-uncovered-my-grandmothers-republican-activism-during-the-irish-revolution-189326

Corinne M.
BELLIARD

Corinne M. Belliard is a historian and specialist in British history and Studies. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is an associate researcher at CRESH (Université d’Artois) and ERIAC (Université Rouen Normandie), and she teaches English in the LanSAD department at Université d’Évry Paris Saclay. Her most recent publication is a book chapter on the globalisations of the 1880s to the mid-1930s titled “Women and Feminist Movements,” published by Bréal in 2024. She is also the co-author of a forthcoming book chapter, “From Disobedience to Resistance (1939–1945): Silent Heroines of the PTT,” to be published by Edinburgh University Press.

Caitlin Galante
DEANGELIS

Caitlin Galante DeAngelis holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she specialized in the political history of cemeteries. In 2024, she published The Caretakers: War Graves Gardeners and the Secret Battle to Rescue Allied Airmen in World War II. She is currently working on a comparative study of the Allied nations’ policies regarding the repatriation of soldiers’ bodies.

Iole
DE ANGELIS

Iole De Angelis is a civil servant at the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and holds a PhD. in strategy and military history on the role of information and communication technologies in asymmetric conflicts. For more than twenty years, she has been interested in the place of women in military history and in the representation of femininity in war. As a specialist in defence public policy and transformation management, she applies her expertise to the modernization of public action and the strengthening of national strategic capacities. She works to promote an inclusive understanding of contemporary military thought.

Aimée
DION

A recipient of scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec, Aimée Dion is a PhD candidate in history and a lecturer at Université Laval. Her monograph, Affiches de guerre, guerre d’affiches. Canada français et Irlande pendant la Grande Guerre (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2024), was a finalist for the Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Award granted by the Canadian Historical Association in 2025. Using a comparative approach, her research focuses on the representation of violence and nationalism in the visual cultures of the First World War in French Canada and Ireland.

Catherine
DUPUY

Catherine Dupuy is an agrégée and holds a doctorate in contemporary history. She is Head of the Outreach Unit for Remembrance Policy at the Directorate for Memory, Culture and Archives (DMCA) of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces. Forthcoming publication: an article to appear in the journal Matériaux pour l’Histoire de notre temps, special issue “Photographier et filmer les bidonvilles en France,” no. 2026/2.

Susan R.
GRAYZEL

Susan R. Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University, researching and teaching about modern Europe and its empires, women’s and gender history, and war and culture, especially of the world wars transnationally. Her books include Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (UNC Press, 1999); Women and the First World War (2002, 2 nd edition Routledge, 2024); At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012); the co-edited volume Gender and the Great War (Oxford, 2017), and The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (Cambridge, 2022).

Caroline
FRANÇOIS

With a background in History, Caroline François is responsible for the scientific and cultural programming of the Hauts lieux de la mémoire nationale in Île-de-France (ONaCVG) and is associate curator of the National Memorial to Women in Resistance and Deportation. She has curated exhibitions such as Julia Pirotte, Photographer and Resistance Fighter; Graffiti for Memory: Women in the Resistance; Engagées; Women in Deportation, Ravensbrück; Women’s Involvement in the Resistance; and Simone Veil, a Life of Struggles. She is also the author of publications including Itineraries of Women in the Resistance; Religious Women in the Resistance; and Marguerite Matisse.

Sophie
HOCHULI

Sophie Hochuli is a PhD student enrolled in a joint program between the University of Zurich (Romanisches Seminar) and Paris-Saclay University (UVSQ, CHCSC). She is preparing a PhD. on the literary work of Micheline Maurel, focusing on the gaps between writing and publication, between contemporary reception and gradual forgetting, as well as the singularity of a “normality” writing applied to the concentration camp universe, which perverts the usual order of the world. She has published an article in Versants on the origins of Maurel’s writing and a conference paper on Mesure de nos jours by Charlotte Delbo. She is also a research assistant in the Franco-German project Emergent Remembering.

Lynelle
HOWSON

Historienne de formation, Caroline François est responsable de la programmation scientifique et culturelle des Hauts lieux de la mémoire nationale en Ile-de-France (ONaCVG) et commissaire associée du Mémorial national des femmes en résistance et en déportation. Elle a été commissaire des expositions : Julia Pirotte, photographe et résistante ; Graffitis pour mémoire, femmes en résistance ; Engagées ; Femmes en déportation, Ravensbrück ; L’engagement des femmes dans la Résistance ; Simone Veil, une vie de combats. Elle est également autrice des publications : Itinéraires de résistantes ; Religieuses en résistance ; Marguerite Matisse.

Tamar
KETKO

Tamar Ketko (Ph.D.) is a Historian and a Philosopher of Education. Her studies focus on issues regarding Collective Memory, Holocaust, WWII resistance, Nazi Education, National Identities, the Ethics of History, and Moral Values of multi-cultural societies. She is a senior lecturer at the Kibbutzim College of Education, and the Chief Curator of the Chaim Herzog Museum of the Jewish Soldier in WWII. Dr. Ketko creates documentaries on TV channels about resistance during World War II, based on her local and global research.

Elizabeth
KIRKLAND

Dr. Elizabeth Kirkland is a tenured professor in the Department of History and Classics at Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec and an active member of the Groupe d’histoire de Montreal. Her research interests focus on the history of women and gender particularly within Montreal. She is the co-editor of Montreal’s Square Mile: The Making and Transformation of a Colonial Metropole (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024). https://ghm.uqam.ca/membre/elizabeth-kirkland-fr/

Nadège
LE LAN

Nadège Le Lan is a Senior Lecturer in French language and literature at the University of the Littoral Côte d’Opale / ISCID-CO and a member of the HLLI laboratory. Her research focuses on Arthurian material and its contemporary reception along the following main axes: memory and territory in postwar French theatre; women and female characters in medieval sources and their rewritings. In this context, an important witness to theatrical decentralization and reconstruction, Le Chevalier de Neige by Boris Vian and Georges Delerue, performed in Caen in 1953, led her to take an interest in Silvia Monfort, who played the main female role.

Leeann
LANE

Dr Leeann Lane is a lecturer in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University. She is the author of three full-length biographies of women active during the Irish revolutionary period and in the politics of the Irish Free State: Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010); Dorothy Macardle (Dublin: UCD Press, 2019); Mary MacSwiney (Dublin: UCD Press, 2025). She is currently working on a biography of Sighle Humphreys. Dr Lane is the recipient of a Royal Irish Academy Bursary to curate an exhibition on the afterlives of Cork activists who did not marry.

Mary
MCAULIFFE

Dr Mary McAuliffe is a historian and lecturer at Gender Studies UCD. Her latest publications include (co-authored with Harriet Wheelock) The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn: A Life Revealed through Personal Writing (2023) and Margaret Skinnider; a biography (2020). Other publications include (co-edited with Miriam Haughton and Emilie Pine) Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, gender, and the postcolonial carceral state (2021), and is co-editor (with Jennifer Redmond) of The politics of gender and sexuality in modern Ireland; A Reader (UCD Press, 2024) She is currently completing her book Gendered and Sexual Violence in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919-1923 (forthcoming 2026). She is a past President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland and is a member of the Humanities Institute, UCD and the Women’s Museum Advocacy Group.

Aodhán
MORRIS

Aodhán Morris is a PhD student at the School of Political Studies and Sociology, University of Galway, Ireland, and a practicing independent artist and illustrator. His main research interests include memory politics, history and sociology of political violence, comics studies, and history and theory of sequential art. His PhD project’s focus is moral remembrance in graphic narratives about political violence in 20th century Ireland.

Gerri
O’NEILL

Gerri O’Neill’s doctoral thesis ‘Private Lives and Public Personas: female participation in the IRA during Ireland’s War of Independence, 1919-1921’ was completed in 2020. It has since been reworked and submitted for publication under the title Republican Women and IRA Intelligence during the Irish Revolution, 1916-1923. She has also published on the sensitive topic of rape and sexual assault during the Irish War of Independence and is currently researching on the role of Alfred (Andy) Cope in British intelligence in Ireland from 1920-1924. Gerri is a lecturer with Dublin City University and teaches distance-education undergraduate history students in the DCU Connected unit.

Sylvie
POMIÈS-MARÉCHAL

Sylvie Pomiès-Maréchal is a Senior Lecturer in British Studies at the INSPE Centre Val de Loire – University of Orleans and a member of the REMELICE research group. Her work focuses on the British cultural sphere from a historical perspective and is mainly concerned with the impact of the two World Wars on the social roles of British women. More specifically, she studies the role of female agents of the Special Operations Executive within the French resistance networks (F Section) and, regarding the First World War, the narratives of British nurses serving on the Western Front.

Tammy M.
PROCTOR

Tammy M. Proctor is Distinguished Professor of History at Utah State University (USA) and co-editor of the Journal of British Studies. She is best known for her books, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (2003), Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918 (2010), Gender and the Great War (with Susan Grayzel), and An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp (with Sophie de Schaepdrijver). Her most recent book is Saving Europe: First World War Relief and American Identity (Oxford, 2025).

María Inés
TATO

María Inés Tato holds a PhD in History from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and is a Principal Researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council – Argentina (CONICET) at the Institute of Argentine and American History “Dr Emilio Ravignani”, UBA/CONICET, where she founded and coordinates the Group of Historical War Studies (GEHiGue). Dr Tato is Editor-in-chief of the academic journal Historia & Guerra. Her current research area is the social and cultural history of the war in the twentieth century, particularly the impact of the two World Wars on Argentine society. More info: https://linktr.ee/mariainestato

Isabelle
THUMEREL

Isabelle Thumerel is a senior lecturer in public law at ULCO, specializing in constitutional law, and serves as the director of the Master’s program in Local Government Law. A member of the LARJ research laboratory, she also teaches at Sciences Po Lille as an adjunct lecturer. Her work covers a range of topics related to constitutional law and institutional functioning. She is notably the co-author, with G. Toulemonde, of L’Essentiel des principes fondamentaux de droit constitutionnel (Gualino, 13th ed., 2025). She has also written several studies on issues such as the transparency and opacity surrounding benefits in kind granted to local elected officials, consent to the nation and the question of regional independence movements, as well as the theoretical justifications for Government Questions.

Hélène
WEENS

Hélène Weens is a Doctor in British history. She defended her thesis on the cultural experience of British nurses in Northern France during the First World War at the Université Catholique de Lille, in a joint supervision with Liverpool Hope University. Specializing in cultural exchanges between Great Britain and Northern France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hélène Weens authored an article, “The Ritual of Sea-Bathing in Great Britain and in the North of France in the Nineteenth Century: Innovation and Decency,” published in December 2022 in Culture Com’.

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