This project is building on my doctoral research on Napoleonic experiences of parole captivity, which I conducted in the History Department at Warwick under the supervision of Professor Carolyn Steedman. Entitled 'A passage to imprisonment: British prisoners of war in Verdun under the First French Empire', my PhD thesis explored parole detention as a site of transnational exchange through a case study of a central depot for British civilian and military prisoners of war in Napoleonic France.

I am the co-founder of the Prisoner of War Studies Network (POW Network) with Dr Grace Huxford. Please see below for further information.

Updates

• April 2015: I am currently co-organising with Dr Grace Huxford the forthcoming POW Network conference on 'Gender in War Captivity', to be held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 8 May 2015. See our Network website, or register online via Eventbrite.

• 27 April- 1 May 2015: I am currently taking up a BSECS visiting fellowship at the University of York, and will be co-organising a workshop with York CECS on eighteenth-century visual cultures of war.

• 2 February 2015: I was awarded my PhD in History at the University of Warwick (thesis examined by Dr Renaud Morieux and Professor Mark Knights).

Academic profile

• 2014-2015: Alan Pearsall Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Historical Research (University of London) in conjunction with the University of Warwick (Associate Research fellow of Warwick History department until 2017)
• 2011-2014: PhD (History) University of Warwick. Doctoral project funded by the Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship and supervised by Emeritus Professor Carolyn Steedman FBA.
• 2009-2011: MA by Research (History, Archaeology and Heritage) University of Clermont-Ferrand, France. Including an Erasmus year at the University of Warwick. Distinction.
• 2006-2009: BA (History and English), DEUG undergarduate diploma in German Studies University of Clermont-Ferrand, France. In conjuction with Classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles. Second best student of cohort.
• 2006: French General Baccalaureate Diploma, Literature Strand, speciality Foreign Languages (English, German, Russian). Passed with honours. Equivalent of A level in Maths, Physics, Philosophy, History, English, German and Russian.
  

Awards and scholarships

• 2015: BSECS Visiting Fellowship, University of York
• 2014-2015: Institute of Historical Research Junior Research Fellowship (Alan Pearsall postdoctoral fund)
• 2011-2014: Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship (Chancellor’s doctoral award).
• 2014: Humanites Research Centre Transatlantic Fellowship (for a two-week research project in Canada).
• 2013: International Federation for Research in Women's History postgraduate grant for a paper on female prisoners of war (Sheffield, 01/09/2013).
• 2013: Royal Historical Society, Humanities Research Centre, Centre for the History of Medicine, Warwick IAS Oral History Network and Department of History grants for the co-organisation of the first conference of the POW Network (Warwick , 09/11/2013).
• 2012: Society for the Study of French History Research Grant.
• 2010-2011: Auvergne Council International Mobility Bursary (Clermont-Ferrand, France).
• 2010-2011: Erasmus scholarship.

Publications

I have adapted the third chapter of my thesis for a forthcoming article in a special issue on Napoleonic prisoners of war in Napoleonica. La revue de la Fondation Napoléon edited by Alexander Mikaberidze. My research on gender in war captivity has also led to a chapter on the 'missing spouses' of Napoleonic prisoners in an edited collection of the diary of Catherine Exley, a camp follower during the Pensinsular Wars.

Peer-reviewed publications:

• ‘Charitable connections: Transnational financial networks and relief for British prisoners of war in Napoleonic France, 1803-1814’, Napoleonica. La Revue de la Fondation Napoleon (special issue on Napoleonic prisoners of war edited by Alexander Mikaberidze) (forthcoming, March 2015).
• ‘The missing spouse. The wives of British prisoners in France under Napoleon, their lives and writings’, in Rebecca Probert (ed.) Catherine Exley's Diary: The Life and Times of an Army Wife in the Peninsular War (2014).
• ‘“A colony of captives”: The British prisoners of war at Verdun under the First French Empire (1803–14)’, in ‘Postgraduate Research Grant Reports’, French History (2014) 28:1, p. 144.
• ‘Review: Ambitions Tamed: Urban Expansion in Pre-revolutionary Lyon. By Pierre Claude Reynard. Montreal & Kingston. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2009. xxxii + 264 pp. £57.00. ISBN 978 0 7735 3492 6’, French History (2011) 25:3, pp. 384-385.

Teaching

I devised and led weekly seminars on various historical methodologies and sources (material culture, prosopography, oral history, environmental history etc) for two groups of thirteen students each. I marked examination scripts in Term 1, essays in Term 1 and 2, and supervised twenty-six undergraduate students preparing individual digital research projects in association with Warwick Modern Record Centre in Term 3.

• 2014-onwards, Associate fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
• 2014, Postgraduate Teaching Award: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, University of Warwick. I received this award following successful completion of a teaching portfolio reflecting on my practice as a seminar tutor at Warwick. The portfolio was declared of ‘outstanding’ reflective quality and demonstrating deep engagement with the relevant theoretical literature.

• 2012-2013, Warwick Library postgraduate funding mentor: my role involved identifying internal and external sources of funding for prospective postgraduate students of various disciplines in the arts faculty. Further to this, I provided feedback and weekly supervisions to four MA students to develop their Phd funding applications (three of them were successful).
• 2011-2012, French language tutor: I taught French grammar and conversation classes to five lower intermediate students at Warwick, as part of the World@Warwick transnational teaching scheme.

Employment and professional training

• 2013-2014, Digital Humanities, University of Warwick, Arts faculty branch of the IT services: Academic technologist and website developer for the French department
• 2013, Global History and Culture Centre, Warwick: French translator for the ‘Trading Eurasia’ project led by Professor Maxine Berg
• Language abilities: fluent French (mother tongue), fluent English (Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English, IELTS score 8,5 - European Level of English C2), proficient German (two-year undergraduate diploma in German studies), beginner’s Russian.
  

Public engagement and organisational responsabilities

 

I contributed to the ‘Hundred Days’ outreach project jointly led by Professor Mark Philp and Dr Katherine Atsbury at Warwick. I wrote biographies of objects to be displayed as part of a virtual exhibition available at: http://www.100days.eu/

Co-founder and web-administrator of this international, interdisciplinary, and bilingual (English and French) network bringing together researchers in prisoner of war studies. It gathered sixty four members in May 2014 from across Europe, Africa and North America. Further information on the network and the first conference I co-organised at Warwick on ‘Representing the Prisoner of War’ (09/11/2013) is available on our website.

IAS Travel and Mobility Studies Network, Warwick-Queen Mary project on friendship in the eighteenth century, SSFH and BSECS societies.

Book review editor for Retrospectives, Warwick history postgraduate journal.

Selection of conference and seminar papers

Captive children: Relocating childhood and education in Napoleonic experiences of war captivity, Education in the Long Eighteenth Century seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 21 February 2015.

Voluntary captives? A transnational history of women during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1814), Women’s Histories: The local and the global. IFRHW annual conference, Sheffield Hallam University, 29 August-1 September 2013.

Captive Britannia: Naval prisoners of war and the maintenance of national identity on foreign shores, Nation and Navy, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 25-27 July 2013.

On the Edge of War and Memory: The British prisoners of war at Verdun under Napoleon, Long-Nineteenth-century seminar series, University of Oxford, 12 November 2012.

‘Verdun began to lose the appearance of a French town’: the British prisoners of war at Verdun under Napoleon (1803-1814), 26th SSFH Annual Conference ‘France and Its Neighbours: Towards a Transnational History’, University of York, 1-3 July 2012.

‘The Captive Muse’: Perspectives on the historical use of memoirs of captivity in the Napoleonic Wars’, Writing Lives Symposium, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, 25 May 2012.

Global Perspectives on Imprisonment: A Diptych of Prisoner of War Experience (co-authored with Grace Huxford), Warwick-LSE-Columbia Global History Workshop, University of Warwick, 8-9 March 2012.

‘Narrative of a forced Journey through Spain and France’: the captive memoir of Lord Blayney (1810-1814), French Revolutionary Seminar Series, University of Leeds, 26 January 2012.

Les prisonniers de guerre à Verdun sous le Premier Empire (1803-1814), 136^th CTHS Conference Making War, Making Peace, University of Perpignan (France), 2-7 May 2011.

Verdun: ‘haut lieu’ d’une mémoire palimpseste, Les hauts lieux de l’Antiquité à nos jours, University of Limoges (France), 12-13 April 2011.

Dr Elodie Duché

Email: E.M.Duche@warwick.ac.uk

IHR email: Elodie.Duche@sas.ac.uk

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