Thesis Title: Passing for local in Nazi Occupied France: the strategies of SOE F Section’s female agents
Supervisors: Professor Heather Hamill
Josephine is a DPhil student at Wolfson College and a Clarendon Scholar. Her background is in historical geography and politics, and she is passionate about espionage, literature and spy fiction.
Josephine's thesis focuses on a group of women spies in WWII Occupied France and frames their missions as a case of deceptive mimicry. She strives to understand how these women passed for local civilians and how gender impacted their success on the field.
To do so, she uses archival methods and hopes to derive wider insights about gender in conflict spaces and the use of mimicry by spies.
Research Interests: Historical sociology, mimicry, signalling theory, gender, conflict studies, cultural studies
Previous Education: BA Geography, UCL; MSc Global Politics, LSE
