Research

Julia Torrie’s research and teaching, which is grounded in German History, is transnational and global in scope. It has two main directions – the social and cultural history of war, and food history and imperialism. On the one had, she is examining German women’s work in occupied Europe during the Second World War, while on the other, she is investigating the interplay of industrial freezing and German and French overseas imperialism.   

Torrie has published two books and a co-edited volume on Germany, France and Europe in the Second World War, as well as articles and book chapters on themes ranging from tourism to visual and food history. Her book German Solders and the Occupation of France, 1940-1944 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explores the contradiction between the inherent violence of a military occupation and German occupiers’ construction of it in diaries, letters, and photographs as pleasurable. Her earlier book, For Their Own Good: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945 (Berghahn, 2010), used air-raid induced evacuations to explore questions of consent, wartime social policy and popular protest. Torrie has been a Fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), the Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes, and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and her research has been funded notably by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.