Hanna Diamond

Hanna Diamond is a professor of French history at Cardiff University, Wales. She earned both her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Sussex. She won an ESRC-CNRS scholarship to undertake her History DPhil research in France, which she completed in 1992 with a dissertation on "Women and the Second World War in the Toulouse region." After several years working in a variety of higher education institutions in Paris, including the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses and Université de Paris X Nanterre, she was appointed lecturer at the University of Bath in 1993. She was named to a Chair at Cardiff University in 2014. Prof. Diamond's specialty is the social and cultural history of France during World War II and memory of this period. She is interested in oral histories of people's everyday experiences of these traumatic events, and developed an interactive website (http://www.fleeinghitler.org/) to enable people to post family stories about experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe. She has worked in an advisory role with the Musée de la Libération de Paris-Musée du général Leclerc-Musée Jean Moulin, and co-curated with Dr. Sylvie Zaidman, the museum's director, the 2020 exhibition entitled 1940: Les Parisiens dans l'exode (1940: Parisians in the Exodus). Prof. Diamond has a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2021-2023 to research the wartime activities of Josephine Baker, who acted as a spy for the French Resistance. Her books include Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints (1999) and Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (2007). She also works with a number of radio, television, film, and theater directors, producers, and scriptwriters.