The Secret WW2 Learning Network is delighted to announce that we have an eminent new Trustee in the person of Professor Juliette Pattinson.
At the shortened, 'essential business only' and online AGM of the charity on 14th July 2020, the Trustees of the Secret WW2 Learning Network were delighted to unanimously vote Juliette onto the charity's Board. Many of you will already know, or know of, Juliette, but you may not know the extent of her 'secret war' expertise. So to share the full story with you: Newly-promoted to the distinction of Professor, Juliette is Head of the School of History and Deputy Director of the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University of Kent and will bring a wealth of professional expertise to the Network. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Lancaster, graduating in December 2004 and then taught at the University of Wales, Bangor (2003-4), the University of Strathclyde (2004-13) and has also tutored with the Open University (2004-12), before joining Kent in 2013. Juliette describes herself as a socio-cultural historian with particular interests in the Second World War. Her research interests and publications to date having been on cultural memory, oral history methodology, gender, and warfare in Western and Eastern Europe. Her research on the Special Operations Executive resulted in Behind Enemy Lines (2007) as well as a popular history book, Secret War (2001) and articles in both academic and public history magazines and newspapers. She has also co-authored a book, Men in Reserve (2016) on men in reserved occupations in the Second World War and has co-edited four collections, on partisan and anti-partisan warfare across Eastern Europe; the cultural memory of the Second World War; Britishness in the Second World War; and British civilian and military men in the second World War. She is currently working on a collection on British humour and the Second World War. She has co-edited two journal special issues, on male POWs and on partisan warfare. She regularly speaks at local history societies on the SOE and has appeared on British, Indian, American and Australian radio and film taking about SOE and the Second World War more generally, most recently appearing on ‘Tony Robinson's History of Britain’ (25 January 2020, Channel 5). Her latest work, fresh off the press, is Women of war: gender, modernity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry and is now returning to an oral history project on the SOE-FANYs. Juliette has accepted the invitation to join us, commenting that she is delighted to have been asked and looks forward to working with us in the future.