Prof. Julia S. Torrie – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Julia S. Torrie

St. Thomas University, Canada
Contemporary European History

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
September 2022 – April 2023

Last Update: 31.08.2023

Curriculum Vitae

Julia S. Torrie holds an A.M and Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a professor of History at St. Thomas University (Canada). Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Europe and the world. She has written German Soldiers and the Occupation of France (Cambridge, 2018), which uses soldiers’ diaries, letters and amateur photographs to examine the occupation of France (1940-44) from below. A previous monograph, “For Their Own Good”: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945 (Berghahn, 2010), compared civilian evacuations in the two countries. Torrie is a 2021-22 fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes, France, and a former fellow of the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her research has also been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the German Academic Exchange Service. She has published on soldier tourism, the German home front and frozen food in wartime and is preparing a history of the intersection of industrial freezing and imperialism.

Selected Publications

Scheck, Raffael, Théofilakis, Fabien et Torrie, Julia, eds., German-occupied Europe in the Second World War. London: Routledge, 2019, 263 pp.
Torrie, Julia. German Soldiers and the Occupation of France, 1940-1944, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 276 pp.
Torrie, Julia. “The Home Front.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich. Robert Gellately, ed., Oxford University Press, 2018, 275-310.
Torrie, Julia. “Frozen Food and National Socialist Expansionism.” Global Food History, 2:1 (Mar. 2016): 51-73.
Torrie, Julia. “For Their Own Good:” Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945. New York : Berghahn Books, 2010, 269 pp.

FRIAS Project

Frozen Food and Empire

This project explores links between empire building and frozen food from the 1890’s through the 1970’s. Beginning in the late 19th century, ships with refrigerated holds brought frozen meat from areas with ample grazing land, like Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, to protein-hungry European cities. Despite wars and regime changes, this pattern persisted, laying key groundwork for global food systems today.

Using a long time-frame and a wide geographical scope, this project makes three main contributions. First, it draws on the historiographies of both food and empire to reveal ground-level processes through which products from peripheral areas were drawn toward imperial centres. Second, in studying frozen food infrastructure, it analyses the economic, social and cultural relationships freezer warehouses created and demonstrates how prioritizing empire-building motivated technological change and how new technologies enabled empire. Finally, the research offers novel ways to understand similarities and differences between “classic” colonial empires, wartime structures like Hitler’s Greater Germany, and trade-based imperial complexes that did not involve direct geo-political control.

“Frozen Food and Empire” investigates the historical processes that underpin today’s global food market. It addresses food security and examines the roots of ongoing power imbalances between peripheral areas, where agricultural products are often produced and frozen, and metropoles, where they are typically consumed.