Sarah Bennett Farmer

Picture of Sarah Bennett Farmer
Professor, History
School of Humanities
Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 1992, History
B.A., Yale University, 1980, History
Phone: History Department: (949) 824-6521
Email: sfarmer@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
233 Krieger Hall
Mail Code: 3275
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Modern French history, twentieth-century Europe, social and cultural history.
Research Abstract
My first book, Martyred Village: Commemorating the Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, 1944 (University of California Press, 1998; Calmann-Levy, 1994: Perrin, 2004 and 2007) identified the preservation of sites of wartime trauma, and their configuration as landscapes of loss, as a defining element of European postwar culture. My new book, Rural Inventions: The French Countryside after 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) takes up landscape in a different way to explore the ways in which affective attachment to a rural past and landscapes define modern life long after deruralization takes place. I study the effect on postwar French society of the demise of rural worlds long considered the bedrock of the nation and civic life. I provide implications that go beyond the French case for understanding how societies make sense of their traditions in light of dynamics of change particular to the twentieth century.
Publications
Books
Rural Inventions: The French Countryside after 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Oradour: Arrêt sur mémoire (Paris: Éditions Calmann Lévy, 1994); second edition (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2004).

Oradour 10 juin 1944: Arrêt sur mémoire, Collection Tempus (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2007).

Sarah Farmer and Serge Tisseron, Parlez-moi d’Oradour (Paris: Éditions Perrin et le Centre de la Mémoire d’Oradour-sur-Glane, 2004).
Film Collaboration

Oradour: Part 1, Les Voix de la douleur; Part 2, Aujourd'hui, la mémoire. DVD. Directed by Michel Follin; written by Marc Wilmart. 1989. Paris: INA, 2010. (Historical advisor, appeared on camera, provided commentary).
Articles
"The Other House: The Secondary Residence in Postwar France," French Politics, Culture & Society, Spring 2016 (Vol. 33, No. 1)
"Les mémoires paysans et la transformation de la France rurale d'après-guerre" In Une Protection de la nature à la française (XIXe-XXe siècles), edited by Charles-François Mathis and Jean-François Mouhot (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2012): 292-297.

"Memoirs of French peasant life: progress and nostalgia in postwar France," French History 25, no. 3 (2011): 362-379.

“Going Visual: Holocaust Representation and Historical Method,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 115-122.

“Foreign Labor in Vichy, France: The Groupements de Travailleurs Etrangers” In Forced Labor and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe: Symposuim Presentations (Washington DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004).

"Not in the Picture: Foreign Labor in Wartime France" In France at War: Vichy and the Historians, edited by Sarah Fishman, Leonard Smith et al. (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

"Postwar Justice in France: Bordeaux, 1953," In The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, edited by Istvan Deak and Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Last updated
09/24/2021