Brian Ringrose

Wissenschaftlicher Werdegang

Stipendien

Promotionsprojekt

The (Re-)Ordering of Time in the années noires of France. Chronopolitics, Discourses of Temporality and Temporal Practices from the drôle de guerre to the Libération, 1939-1944

The PhD Project aims to shed new light on the National Socialist war in the West and occupied France from a cultural-historical perspective by analysing contemporary chronopolitics, discourses of temporality and temporal practices. Its initial hypothesis is that the National Socialist regime intended to establish a hegemonic “order of time“ in France (as well as in the rest of Europe). Furthermore, it is assumed that the war and the occupation fundamentally transformed the everyday experiences of time, the concepts of time, and the horizons of expectations of the occupiers as well as the occupied. The Project investigates how and by which chronopolitics and temporal practices this new order of time was established, enforced, adopted, or even problematised.

By combining the methodological approach of Practice theory and theories of historical times/temporality, it is possible to examine the transformation and reconfiguration of power relations and the socio-cultural order in the historical context of war and occupation through the lens of specific temporal experiences and practices. The (Re-)Ordering of time by temporal practices thus serves as an analytical vanishing point in order to write an integrated, Franco-German history of the war in the West and of the “occupied society” (Tatjana Tönsmeyer) in France. The groups of actors to be examined include French and German soldiers, the French civilian population, the Résistance and members of the German occupying forces as well as representatives of the Nazi and Vichy regimes.