This session will combine a lecture by Julie Gottlieb and a film screening of screenwriter and filmmaker Nicola Baldwin’s The Nervous State, on which Gottlieb was associate producer.

The film is a dramatization of a rediscovered diary, F.L. Lucas’s Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (1939), a source that provides unique insight into the intellectual and emotional life of its author against the backdrop of accelerating political crisis and the deteriorating mental health of his young wife Prudence. The film represents his activism as a public intellectual against appeasement, fascism and antisemitism, and his desperation to preserve democratic values. I will provide the context for the Lucases’ biographies and their historical significance, before moving on offering an account of the dynamic process of collaboration and co-creation that has allowed us to tell a story to the public that has particular resonance and relevance in our own historical moment of permacrisis.

Julie Gottlieb is professor of modern history in the School of History, Philosophy and the Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield, UK. She was educated at McGill University and the University of Cambridge. She has written extensively on women in modern British politics, women and political extremism, the aftermath of women’s suffrage, and the history from below (and the history from within) of international crisis. Her current research concerns an epidemic of war-fear-triggered suicides during Britain’s so-called ‘war of nerves’ (1938–1940), and she holds a Leverhulme Research Award to explore this. Her publications include Feminine Fascism (2000/2nd edition 2021), ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Interwar Britain (2015), The Nervous State: F.L. Lucas and the Internalization of Crisis, 1938 (forthcoming 2026), and many edited collections and special issues, most recently Women on the Right (co-edited with Clarisse Berthezene and Laura Lee Downs, 2024).