Books
Fathi, Romain. Our Corner of the Somme. Australia at Villers-Bretonneux. Melbourne/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Among other reviews available in print and online, please find that of Frank Bongiorno, Justin Chadwick, Paul Daley, Margaret Harris, David Stephens & Neville Taylor.
Fathi, Romain. Représentations muséales du corps combattant de 14-18. L'Australian War Memorial de Canberra au prisme de l'Historial de la Grande Guerre de Péronne. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013.
Reviews of the book include that of Antoine Prost and Elizabeth Rechniewski.
Edited Volumes
Fathi Romain, Hutchison Margaret, Varnava Andrekos, and Walsh Michael (eds.) Exiting war. The British empire and the 1918-20 moment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, January 2022. Reviewed by Douglas Newton in AJPH.
Fathi, Romain and Robertson, Emily (eds.) Proximity and Distance: Space, Time and the First World War. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020.
Book chapters
Fathi, Romain. “Subir l’impérialisme: l’Océanie au XXe siècle” in Nicolas Beaupré & Florian Louis (eds.), Histoire Mondiale du XXe siècle, Presses Universitaires de France, 2022, pp.447-45.
Fathi, Romain. “La base arrière australienne” in La Seconde Guerre mondiale vue d’ailleurs, Claude Quétel (ed.), Paris: Buchet Castel, 2022.
Fathi, Romain; Hutchison, Margaret; Varnava, Andrekos, and Walsh, Michael. “The 1918-20 moment and the British Empire's sorties de guerre” in Exiting war. The British empire and the 1918-20 moment, Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava, and Michael Walsh (eds.), Manchester: Manchester University Press, January 2022.
Fathi, Romain & Robertson, Emily. “World War I and the Space-Time-War Nexus” in Proximity and Distance: Space, Time and the First World War, Romain Fathi and Emily Robertson (eds.) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020.
Fathi, Romain. “Remembrance Day: The poor cousin of Australian war commemoration” in The Great War: Aftermath and Commemoration, Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves (eds). Sydney: New South, November 2019.
Fathi, Romain. “‘They Attack Villers-Bretonneux and block the road to Amiens’. A French perspective on Second Villers-Bretonneux” in New Directions in War and History, Tristan Moss and Thomas Richardson (eds). Newport: Big Sky Publishing, 2017, 53-71.
Fathi, Romain. “‘Connecting Spirits’: comportements commémoratifs d’un groupe scolaire australien dans la Somme” in Den Krieg neu denken? Der Erste Weltkrieg im Spiegel neuer Quellen und Methoden, Bérénice Zunino and Philipp Siegert (eds.). Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2016, 143-162.
Fathi, Romain. “‘A piece of Australia in France’: Australian authorities and the commemoration of Anzac Day at Villers-Bretonneux in the last decade”, in Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration. Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Shanti Sumartojo and Ben Wellings (eds.). Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014, 273-290.
Special Issue
Fathi, Romain & Oppenheimer, Melanie, Double Special issue: Voluntary Organisations and Reconstruction in Western Europe after the World Wars, European Review of History, 30, no.5 (2023)
Hutchison Margaret, Fathi Romain, Varnava Andrekos & Walsh Michael, Special Issue: Australia and the ‘End’ of World War I, Australian Historical Studies, 52:1 (2021).
Fathi, Romain and Ziino, Bart. Coming Home. Special issue, History Australia, 16, no.1(2019): 1-234.
Editorial
Fathi, Romain, Oppenheimer, Melanie & Rosental, Paul-André, “Voluntary organizations, the Red Cross and the features of humanitarian reconstruction in Western Europe after the World Wars”, European Review of History, vol. 30, no. 5, (2023), 665-684.
Margaret Hutchison, Romain Fathi, Andrekos Varnava & Michael Walsh, “The Longer Battle: Australia, World War I and Its Aftermaths", Australian Historical Studies, 52:1 (2021): 1-7.
Peer reviewed journal articles
Fathi, Romain. “Conceptualising the ‘Administration of the Dead’: Cadavers, war and public health in the early 20th century”, History Compass, 2023 (Open Access).
Fathi, Romain & Oppenheimer, Melanie, “The Shoken Fund and the evolution of the Red Cross movement”, European Review of History, vol. 30, no. 5, (2023), 812-831.
Fathi, Romain. Suppressing an ‘undesirable public controversy’: Corpses, the Department of Defence, and the Australian Graves Services, 1919–1921, History Australia, published online 12 April 2022.
Fathi, Romain. “Sovereignty, Democracy and Neutrality: French Foreign Policy and the National-Patriotic Humanitarianism of the French Red Cross, 1919–1928”, Contemporary European History, 1-19, published online 9 November 2021.
Fathi, Romain. “Centenary (Battlefield Tourism)”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, 5 Jan 2021.
Oppenheimer, Melanie; Schech, Susanne; Fathi, Romain; Wylie, Neville; Cresswell, Rosemary. “Resilient Humanitarianism? Using Assemblage to re-evaluate the history of the League of Red Cross Societies”, The International History Review, Published online: 27 Aug 2020
Fathi, Romain. “Le prosélytisme mémoriel australien dans la Somme et le nouveau Centre Sir John Monash”, 20 & 21 Revue d’Histoire, 143 no. 3 (2019) in press. [translation: “Australian Memory Proselytism in the Somme and the New Sir John Monash Centre”]
Fathi, Romain and Ziino, Bart, “Coming home: Australians’ sorties de guerre after the First World War”, History Australia, 16 no.1 (2019): 5-19.
Fathi, Romain. “‘We refused to work until we had better means for handling the bodies’. Discipline at the Australian Graves Detachment.” First World War Studies, 9, no.1 (2018): 35-56.
Fathi, Romain. “French Commemorations: The Centenary Effect and the (Re)discovery of 14-18”, Australian Journal of Political Science 50, no.3 (2015): 545-552.
Fathi, Romain. “La Grande Guerre de l’identité nationale: mémoire, politique et politiques mémorielles en Australie des années 1980 à nos jours”, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, no. 258 (2015): 71-92. [translation: The Great War of national identity: memory, politics and memory politics in Australia from the 1980s to today]
Fathi, Romain. “La Grande Guerre à l’Australian War Memorial ou l’élaboration d’un mythe national”, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, no. 113-114 (2015): 152-155. [translation: The Great War at the Australian War Memorial and the elaboration of a national myth]
Fathi, Romain. “‘Connecting Spirits’. The commemorative patterns of an Australian school group in Northern France”, Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 3 (2014): 345-359.
Photo: Korean War Veterans Memorial, DC. Credits: Romain Fathi
““Macauley’s Simpson returns and Fathi’s Our Corner of the Somme are the most challenging and thought-provoking things I’ve read about Anzac since the end of the profligate four-year centenary”.
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Newspapers, magazines and Internet publications
This book explores how the French remember Anzac. Or, rather, how they don’t, and how their alleged remembrance is staged by Australian agents of memory for the fulfilment of different agendas.
Our Corner of the Somme. Australia at Villers-Bretonneux tells the fascinating century-long story of French-Australian relations through previously unexplored and untranslated French primary materials, and renews our understanding of Australian war commemoration.
The book documents Australians’ interactions with local French people and French institutions on the former Western Front through their commemoration of Australia’s participation in the First World War.
In this rigorous and richly detailed study, I revise our current understanding of the battlefields of France, and examine the assembly, projection and performance of Australia’s national identity overseas.
Among other reviews, see one published in the Guardian.
This book focuses “on the representations of the soldier’s body: the way that war is enacted by bodies and its effect on bodies”
“In this study of the Australian War Memorial through the optic of the Historial at Péronne in Northern France, Romain Fathi offers a fascinating reflection on the contrasting orientation of the two institutions towards the representation of war.”
“Représentations muséales makes a valuable contribution to the fields of Museum and Memory Studies, sharpening our awareness of the role that the diverse features of the War Museum – design of the building, displays, artwork, literature – play in constructing narratives of conflict.”
Review by Elizabeth Rechniewski, University of Sydney