I loved history from an early age and for most of my life I never dreamed of being anything else but an historian and writer. I graduated from the University of Richmond with a degree in history in 1981. By 1984 I was a graduate student at Emory University working at King’s College on the Strand in England, but the allure of France was just too great, and thus one rainy day I boarded a ferry for the continent and never looked back. In 1991 I earned my Ph.D. in history from Emory with a specialization in early modern French history. While at ODU I developed teaching and research fields in modern European history, medical history, maritime history and Holocaust history.

           As a graduate student I spent almost three years in France conducting research and writing my dissertation. For ten years after that I went back every summer for months at a time to continue research. My first book was a comparative history of multiple towns in France and as I result I conducted research all over the country. Once I had children, I could not travel quite as much, but I still get to France at least once a year. Traveling and discovering new archives are my ways of mixing research and tourism. Archives combine the flavor of a region preserved on old paper with a new locale rich in history.

Annette, graduate student days in the 1980s; left Cluny Museum, right on the streets of Paris

               In 2011 while working on a research project in the southern French town of Montélimar, I got to explore the countryside of Provence, famous for the heavenly smell of lavender and the yummy taste of nougat.

The sweet smell of lavender and the delicious taste of nougat.  Discovering the flavors of historian paradise, Provence.

             In graduate school I met Gayle K. Brunelle, and we became thick as thieves. Once we were both tenured we developed a creative project that became Murder in the Métro, the tale of the first murder ever to occur in the Paris metro, the political assassination of Laetitia Toureaux in 1937. While Gayle and I have published academic works separately and will certainly continue to do so, we also plan a number of future collaborative projects, the first being a sequel to Murder entitled Vengeance: Vichy and the Assassination of Marx Dormoy. We finished the research for this project in summer 2012. This work further exposes the history of the “Cagoule,” right-wing extremists who wanted to topple the Third Republic in the 1930s. As a socialist politician Marx Dormoy exposed the Cagoule in 1937 while he was Minister of the Interior in the government of Léon Blum. During the war former Cagoulards plotted his murder for revenge in 1941, successfully planting a bomb under his bed and blowing him up while he slept. This book promises to be explosive because it tracks Vichy war crimes all the way to the highest echelons of that government. Judith Erhlich Literary Management LLC now represents us (Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite) as creative writers.

The hotel, “Le Relais de L’Émpereur” in Montélimar, site of Marx Dormoy’s 1941 murder, now boarded up and abandoned.

Annette in Provence, summer 2011

             Lately my travels have been tied to Holocaust research. I have journeyed beyond the confines of my comfortable knowledge of France and have begun to work in Poland. I continue to be amazed at the level of antisemitism in Europe today, and it is fascinating to see and compare how the Holocaust (or Shoah) is remembered, dismissed, or forgotten in French and Polish society. I look forward to more work in Poland in the coming years.

Annette at the monument of the Torn out Hearts in Kraków

              I love to write, or should I say re-write, because creativity is a constant process of re-thinking and re-working. For fun I work from time to time on a less scholarly book project called "One Man's Life" about my father's experiences as a young Protestant minister in the Deep South in the late 1940s. My father bequeathed to me his personal archives of over 3000 sermons, and I am trying to match a few of the best with his most humorous stories from his life. This is not a religious book and is written in a style that should appeal to everyone. It contains a collection of several amusing historical vignettes reflective of a world now long gone, for example, when my great-great uncle, Henderson Shaddox, could teach my father a great deal about the ramifications of hubris from the inside of a chicken coop. My father is a consummate storyteller, and I certainly get my love of history from him.

              I live in Norfolk, Virginia with my husband, Chip Croswhite, our sons, Alex and Matthew and our two cats. I had my children later in life. In my generation of female historians, most women didn’t marry or have children. Subsequently, I waited until after tenure to start a family. I thus gave up my life of quiet contemplation and endless travel and have learned to write first with the noises of children (dare I say screams) and now with the thunder of teenagers in the background. My mother is from Portsmouth, and my extended family in Norfolk includes my parents as well.

             One final, little known fact that sometimes causes confusion: My first name is Stephanie to match my brother Stephen. But I have always been called, Annette.