Dr Chloë Pieters

Chloë is a social and cultural historian of the European family in wartime, focusing on Belgium and Great Britain. Her doctoral work investigated the relationship between the institution of the family and the state in Belgium and Great Britain during the First World War, considering how the family is centred, in rhetoric and in practice, as a keystone of social, economic and moral life, and how the crucible of war affected this.Her research therefore examines how states have ceded and retained their cultural and material power over families in order to serve their changing wartime and post-war interests and aids in understanding the power of the state over private life, the tools the state has used to punish, coerce, persuade, and protect, and how families have exercised agency to accept and resist these forces.

Chloë’s postdoctoral project investigates social reconstruction in Belgium and Britain and the attempt to recover from the political, economic, social and emotional impact of war. Both states sought to shape the family to suit the needs of the state and to establish a sense of national unity in the fragmented post-war era. This project will consider not just how the Belgian and British states sought to manage the institution of the family but how families themselves responded to these interventions, whether supporting, accepting, acquiescing, or resisting.

Chloë teaches modern British and European history, including:

BIP 6: History of the British Isles, 1830-1951
Approaches to History: Gender and Sociology
EWP4: 1815-1914 (Society, Nation and Empire)
BIF6: Power, Politics and the People: 1815-1924
BIF7: Changing Identities, 1900-present
EWF 13: Europe Divided, 1914-1989
Disciplines of History