Dr Julie M. Powell is an IRC post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for War Studies. Her current project explores the production and consumption of true crime narratives and reportage during the First World War. Through several case studies in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States, the project considers the ways in which sensational stories of murder in the popular press were shaped by the context of the war and how unprecedented mass death impacted tastes for such narratives. It investigates, moreover, the ways in which true crime tales travelled transnationally and how the memory of the war became imbedded in the subsequent retelling of such stories.
Before coming to UCD, Dr Powell completed her MA (San Francisco State University) and PhD (The Ohio State University) in the United States. Her research has focused on gender, medicine, technology, and the body in wartime. She has authored articles for both Gender & History and Social History of Medicine and has been awarded funds from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Centre International de Recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre, the Social Sciences Research Council, the New York Academy of Medicine, the American Historical Association, and the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique, among others. Her first manuscript explores the transnational development of rehabilitation initiatives for disabled Allied soldiers and the rhetoric that accompanied and facilitated this growth.
Book chapters
‘Making the Case Against the Reds: The Racialization of Communism, 1919-1920’ Julie M. Powell (2019) in Travis Boyce and Winsome Chunnu (eds.), Historicizing Fear: Ignorance, Vilification and Othering, University Press of Colorado
‘Re-membering the War: Masculinity and the Wounded Body in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion’ Julie M. Powell (2016) in Marcelline Block and Barry Nevin (eds.), French Cinema and the First World War: Remembrance and Representation, Rowman and Littlefield
Julie M. Powell, “<3 I AM TRACY: Meme Culture, Coping, and Community during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation, eds. Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Antara Chatterjee, Brian Callender, and A. David Lewis. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2022 (forthcoming).
Articles
‘Shock Troupe: Medical Film and the Performance of “Shell Shock” for the British Nation at War’ Julie M. Powell (May 2017); Reprinted (November 2018) in a special virtual issue, ‘Medicine and War’ Social History of Medicine
‘About-Face: Gender, Disfigurement and the Politics of French Reconstruction, 1918-1924’ Julie M. Powell (November 2016) Gender & History
Julie M. Powell, “Doctoring the Script: Crime Writing, Order, and Medical Authority in the Oeuvre of Doctor Augustin Cabanès, 1894-1928,” Social History of Medicine, 2022. doi:10.1093/shm/hkac009.
Monographs
Julie M. Powell, Bodies of Work: The First World War and the Transnational Making of Rehabilitation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (forthcoming).
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