FRANCESCA HOOFT: DOING MILITARY HISTORY AT THE SEASIDE

By Koen Theunissen & Sophie Polm

Francesca Hooft (1991) has been a PhD student at the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH) and Utrecht University’s Department of History since 2017, the year she obtained her Research Master’s Degree (MA) in History in Utrecht. We sat down with her in the NIMH Building in the ‘Frederikkazerne’ military facility in The Hague, in the dunes near the seaside town of Scheveningen. With two years of her PhD project down and two more to go, she shared some insights with us about her academic background, current endeavours and future prospects.

Before Hooft came to Utrecht University, she studied for her Bachelor’s in History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. From her Bachelor’s thesis onwards, she has been interested in the intersection of security studies and the history of conflict, in particular how people retrospectively view and process their (possibly traumatic) involvement in conflict, and how narratives of legitimization are built. In her research, she often applies theory and methods from the social sciences, such as sociology and psychology. For her Bachelor’s thesis, she looked at how war veterans from the Dutch East Indies recollected their time of service. In her Master’s thesis, she investigated how perpetrators from the time of conflict in Rwanda and Argentina built their images as ‘heroes’ or ‘victims’.

Currently, Hooft does her PhD research on how physicians and nurses within the Armed Forces of the Netherlands have handled ethical dilemmas during their service since the end of the Cold War. She recently published her first research article on this topic in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps. This paper is concerned with the crucial tension between the Hippocratic Oath on the one hand, namely the obligation to medically assist anyone in need, and the military identity and hierarchy on the other hand, specifically when engaged in a military operation. This issue is known in literature as the ‘dual loyalty’ problem, which has been a major research theme in the United States, Britain and Israel. Hooft hopes to achieve both fundamental insights relevant to the academic debate and practical recommendations suitable for the Armed Forces of the Netherlands.

Hooft engages with other military historians at international symposia and seminars, such as the ‘New Horizons in Military History’ seminar at the Netherlands Research School for Political History, which she co-organized herself in February 2019. Hooft is now about halfway through her PhD project and has concluded her archival research, which she mostly conducted at the NIMH and the Dutch Ministry of Defence Archive. She is also a fervent proponent of oral history, a method very well suited to her contemporary subject and individual approach. She has already spoken with dozens of military physicians and nurses and plans to complete at least forty interviews in total. She says that, contrary to popular belief, military culture does allow people to openly talk about their experiences, and that servicemen even find comfort in telling their stories.

Furthermore, Hooft invites students to make use of the collections of the NIMH, which are openly available to anyone interested in military history. She recommends to students interested in pursuing a career in academia to carefully look at the process of writing a thesis, and to contact any researchers that share a specific research interest. Personally, she hopes to continue her career in academia after finishing her PhD, either at a university or again in some capacity at a research institute.