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Profile

Professor 
Director, Outreach and Experiential Learning 
B.A. University of Guelph 
Msc University of Edinburgh 
Ph.D. University of Waterloo

Office: McNally North 232
Phone: 902-420-5759
Email: kirrily.freeman@smu.ca

Kirrily Freeman has a Bachelors degree in European Studies, a Masters in Second World War Studies and a PhD in History from the University of Waterloo, completed in 2004. Dr. Freeman’s research focuses on the cultural history of Western Europe in the Twentieth Century. Her first book, Bronzes to Bullets tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War. Her most recent book, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, deals with the post-war history of the French town of Vichy and how it has managed the stigma of collaboration. She is currently working on a history of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFA&A) program after The Second World War.

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Selected Publications

Books:

Kirrily Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity: Stigma, Victimhood & Decline (Palgrave Pivot, 2022) 

Reading the Postwar Future: Textual turning points from 1944 (Bloomsbury Academic, October 2019) 

Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary, 1941-1944 (Stanford University Press, 2009) 

Chapters in Edited Volumes:

“A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity” in Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame (eds); The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936-2016 (Berghahn, 2016)

“‘Pedestals Dedicated to Absence’: Vichy’s Legacy in French Urban Spaces” in Patricia Lorcin and Daniel Brewer (eds), France and its Spaces of War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Articles:

“Performing Leisure as Labour in the Queen of Spas: Tourism, ‘Cure-ism’, and Masquerade in Third Republic Vichy” Journal of Tourism History 13:1 (2021),

Kirrily Freeman, “Saving Civilization: The ‘Monuments Men’ in History and Memory” Journal of Women’s History 33:2 (Summer 2021):85-110.

Kirrily Freeman, “Charlie’s War: The Life and Death of a Black South African in the Canadian Expeditionary Force” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 48:3, June 2020, published online November 11, 2019,

“Amusez-vous, Vichyssois”: Wartime Morality and Home Front Tensions in WWI Vichy” (with Katherine Crooks) French History, 31:2, June 2017, p. 194-218.

“‘Filling the Void’: Absence, Memory and Politics in Place Clichy” Modern and Contemporary France, 18:1 February 2010, p. 51.

The bells, too, are fighting:” The Fate of European Church Bells in the Second World War” Canadian Journal of History, winter 2008, Volume 43, no. 3, pp 417-450.

“Incident in Arles: Regionalism, Resistance and the Case of the Statue of Frédéric Mistral”Contemporary European History Volume 16, Issue 1, February 2007, pp 37-50.

“The Battle for Bronze: Conflict and Contradiction in Vichy Cultural Policy” Nottingham French Studies, Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 50-65.


Exhibitions:

Silence and Memory: The Lost Bells of Europe, ¶¶ÒõÊÓƵ Art Gallery, May-June 2011.