Biography

Heather Jones (b.1978) completed her undergraduate study at Trinity College, University of Dublin where she was a Foundation Scholar of the university. She obtained double First Class Honors with a Gold Medal for her B.A. degree in English and History in 2000. After an M. Phil. in American Literature at the University of Cambridge as a British Council Chevening Scholar, where she studied the novelist Edith Wharton, she returned to Trinity College Dublin with a scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) to pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of History under the supervision of Professor Alan Kramer.
Her thesis, on the treatment of British, French and German prisoners of war during the First World War, was the first comparative approach to this subject and required work in three languages and a number of countries. It was completed in 2006 and was considered by the examiners to be a major contribution to the cultural, social and legal history of the conduct of modern war. In 2007, she won an inaugural IRCHSS Eda Sagarra Gold Medal, awarded in recognition of the outstanding nature of her Ph.D.
In 2004, Dr Jones was awarded a scholarship by the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne (France), which is a leading museum and research centre on the international history of the Great War. In 2007 she was appointed to the small executive board of the Historial’s international Research Centre. In 2006-7 she held a temporary lectureship in modern European history in TCD and was runner-up for the prize for best postgraduate essay in the competition organized by the German Historical Institute and the Royal Historical Society in London. In 2007-8, she is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, which she will use to turn her thesis into a book.
Her publications include: “The Final Logic of Sacrifice? Violence in German Prisoner of War Labor Companies in 1918,” in a special edition of The Historian, vol. 68, no. 4, winter 2006, pp. 747-770, and “Encountering the ‘Enemy’: Prisoner of War Transport and the Development of War Cultures in 1914” in Pierre Purseigle ed., Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World War Studies (Boston; Leiden, Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), pp. 133-162. Her article “‘Besatzung’ neu entdecken. Die Erfahrungen der Kriegsgefangenen im besetzten Belgien und Nordfrankreich,” is due to be published in Nicolas Beaupré, Benoît Majerus and Bernhard Struck eds, Besatzungserfahrungen in Europa (1914-1945) (Essen, Klartext, 2007). She is currently editing a collection on the First World War: Untold War: New Interpretations of the First World War due to be published with Brill Academic Publishers in 2008 and is working on revising her doctoral thesis for publication.