CfP: America in the Trenches: A centennial exploration of America’s involvement in the Great War – extended deadline

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This Call for Papers is for a conference on WWI at CSU Bakersfield, on Saturday, Oct. 13, 2018.

We invite proposals for either 3-paper panels or an individual 20-minute research presentation (that is, a roughly 10-page paper) from established and emerging scholars, as well as from graduate and advanced undergraduate students. These proposals may come from diverse disciplines, as well as those that take an interdisciplinary perspective. We plan to publish selected conference papers digitally. For more information about the conference, visit http://phi.csub.edu, or follow us on Facebook @CSUB Public History Institute.

Papers may be on WWI itself or on the many ripple effects of the war. Examples include, but are not limited to, art, poetry, music, theater, health issues, new technology, existential angst, the role of women, propaganda, political upheaval, religious reactions, the use of animals in war, life on the home front, and so much more.

The conference will include breakfast and lunch, plus an afternoon keynote address by Dr. Diane M.T. North, drawn from her forthcoming book: California at War: The State and the People during World War I (University of Kansas Press, 2018).

Please email abstracts of roughly 200 words, along with a one-page c.v., to Prof. Miriam Raub Vivian at mvivian@csub.edu by Friday, September 14, 2018. Full paper submissions will be due via email by Monday, Oct. 1.

Conference registration, which is $40 per person, is payable online, and due by Monday, October 1, at http://phi.csub.edu.

CfP: Motherhood, Loss and the First World War

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Senate House, London
5 – 6 September 2018

The extraordinary death tolls suffered on the fighting fronts of the First World War gave rise to unprecedented levels of loss for individuals and communities across Europe and the wider world. Indeed, bereavement became so widespread during the conflict that it can rightly be regarded as one of the defining experiences of the war. Historians have had relatively little to say about wartime loss, however, and the bereaved have not been widely acknowledged or remembered during the centenary commemorations of the conflict.

In order to shed light on this much-overlooked theme, a conference will be held at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London on 5 and 6 September that will bring historians and community groups together to explore maternal bereavement as a result of the war, an experience that was understood to be particularly painful and difficult to come to terms with. The conference will be held as part of an ongoing community project, Motherhood, Loss and the First World War, funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and led by Big Ideas, the London Centre for Public History and the Institute of Historical Research.

Proposals for papers on relevant themes in the form of 400-word abstracts should be sent to edward.madigan@rhul.ac.uk by 20 June 2018.

Download poster: CFP Motherhood Loss and the First World War

CfP: From War to Welfare: Global Perspectives since the Nineteenth Century

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Special Issue of Contemporanea

A large body of scholarship has shown how the experience of the two world wars in the twentieth century was a crucial catalyst for the creation of modern welfare states. However, war’s role in social legislation has yet to be conceptualized more fully. In mainstream comparative literature on the welfare state, war is typically considered a rare, anomalous occurrence that is conceived as a kind of exogenous shock, as an ‘abnormal event’, a ‘black swan’ emergency or a critical juncture. In this way, war has constituted a gray zone in the history of the welfare state. By contrast, the question of the origins and development of social protection systems has been viewed primarily in relation to processes of modernization or as an instrument for managing social conflict.

Nonetheless, recent studies of different national contexts have shown the fruitfulness of an approach that looks at the welfare state through the interpretative paradigm of the welfare-warfare link (for example: Scheidel 2017; Obinger–Petersen 2015; Castle 2010). Moreover, recent research has also highlighted how wartime conflicts involved planning processes that cast long shadows over the subsequent peacetime. Antecedent conditions and long-term social policy repercussions of war in postconflict periods must therefore be carefully analyzed, and from comparative, connective and global perspectives, in order to highlight the broader ways in which war and welfare have intersected in the past and over time.

This special issue of Contemporanea aims to reflect on the multifaceted causal links between war and the development of welfare states, which are conceived here broadly to include not only national social legislation but also the myriad of social programmes that flourished in the wake of war. We invite proposals that examine the welfare-warfare nexus over more than two centuries (19th-20th) and on a wide variety of geographic and political contexts (among them also colonial and post–colonial contexts). In particular, Contemporanea would welcome proposals focusing on the following topics as they relate to the welfare-warfare nexus:

Questions related to gender, sexuality and the family
Tax systems and equality
Public health and assistance
Risk and social insurance
Mass conscription
Labour legislation
And other topics that highlight how conflicts have served (or not served) as accelerators in the national and transnational debates on approaches to social protection

The proposals (600 words maximum) accompanied by a brief (2-page max) CV should be sent by August 15, 2018 to the editors Julia Moses (j.moses@sheffield.ac.uk), Ilaria Pavan (ilaria.pavan@sns.it) and Chiara Giorgi (mariachiara.giorgi@unipi.it) along with a CC to the editorial secretary (contemporanea@mulino.it). Responses will be sent by e-mail by September 30, 2018, and the selected essays must be submitted in their final form by February 28, 2019. All manuscripts will be refereed through a peer-review process (double blind). The special issue will be published by Summer 2020. Please note that all manuscripts should be submitted in English.

Contemporanea publishes contributions in Italian and English. For more information about the journal: http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/riviste/issn/1127-3070#presentazione. Contemporanea is indexed by: ISI Web of Science (Art & Humanities Citation Index), Scopus Bibliographic Database, Historical Abstracts, America: History and Life, Articoli italiani di periodici accademici (AIDA), Journal Seek, Essper, Bibliografia storica nazionale, Catalogo italiano dei periodici (ACNP), and Google Scholar.

CfP: Commemoration, Memory, Archive, Sussex University, 4 & 5 Sept. 2018

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COMMEMORATION, MEMORY, ARCHIVE
Investigating commemorative and memorial uses of personal, non-professional images in the digital age in the Global South
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex
4th and 5th September 2018

The commemorative and memorial use of personal, private images in the context of large-scale violence and death has a long history. Private images have been continually employed to access worlds that no longer exist, to de-anonymize, individualize or humanize victims, to identify murderers and the murdered, to evidence contested events and to prove the existence of life before death. They populate archives, memorials and museums, places of public protest and, increasingly, myriad regions of the internet.

We invite contributions to both the roundtable discussions and more traditional conference papers. Please note that the aim of the roundtables is to generate and facilitate a broad exchange of knowledge and ideas and to nurture collaboration. Consequently, as selected roundtable members you will be asked to participate in the discussion from the perspective of your research expertise rather than present a traditional conference/practice paper.

Full details here.

Roundtable Participation
If you would like to participate in the Roundtable discussions please send a 300-word expression of interest with a brief biography to Piotr Cieplak on imageandcommemoration@gmail.com by 9th July 2018.

Abstracts should include: a) a brief overview of how your research or practice work fits into the remit of the roundtables b) three key points you would like to include for consideration and discussion among other participants.

Traditional Papers
If you would like to submit a more traditional, 20-minute paper on any of the themes covered by the roundtables above please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief biography to Piotr Cieplak on imageandcommemoration@gmail.com by 9th July 2018.

We are particularly interested in hearing from early career researchers but abstracts from people at all stages of their career are welcome.

There will be dedicated networking time to further future collaborations.

CfP: New Voices in the History of War, Oxford, 18 July 2018

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Organisers: Anita Klingler, Dr Ismini Pells, Jan Tattenberg, Louis Morris

It is now more than a half-century since ‘new military history’ began to challenge the traditional orthodoxy among historians of war, and successive waves of social and cultural history during the intervening decades have made an indelible impact on the changing face of the subdiscipline. Despite several methodological revolutions, however, many aspects of the field remain little changed. These include the dominant focus on Western theatres of conflict and the twentieth century, the preponderance of male historians on panels and faculty rosters, and the marginal position of history of war within the academy.

This one-day conference aims to bring together diverse representatives of a new generation of researchers, and use their cutting-edge work as a starting point for discussions regarding the future of the history of war as a broad interdisciplinary enterprise. We invite doctoral students and early career researchers, including those working in other fields who have an interdisciplinary connection to the study of war, to submit papers on any aspect of warfare across all periods and places.

Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
• Past and future developments in the historiography of war
• Transnational networks as military actors
• Cultural and artistic depictions of warfare
• War and peace as evolving concepts in political thought
• Comparative global approaches to conflict
• Soldiers as case studies within the history of gender and race
• New approaches to operational military history

The day will conclude with a plenary discussion of the best way to advance the field and to increase the diversity of its approaches and participants.

The conference will be held at All Souls College, Oxford, on Wednesday 18th July 2018, with the generous financial support of the Pembroke College Annual Fund and the Oxford Centre for European History.

Abstracts (maximum 300 words) for papers of 20 minutes should be submitted to the organisers at newvoicesconference2018@gmail.com along with a CV or brief biographical text by 18th June 2018.

We aim to offer travel subsidies for speakers, and full details will be announced with the start of registration on 21st June 2018.

CfP: Imperial Implosions: World War I and its Global Implications

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California State University at Channel Islands, Camarillo, California, and the History Department are pleased to announce that it will host a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on November 8th and 9th, 2018. The focus of the conference is Imperial Implosions: The Global Implications of World War I. We are looking for papers dealing with any aspect of the World War I in Asia, Africa, America, Europe, Latin America or elsewhere where there were significant historical implications and reverberations.

Featured speakers at the conference will be Professor Sean McMeekin of Bard College and the author of The Russian Revolution (2017) and The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2015) and Professor Pria Satia, of Stanford University and the author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (2018) and The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (2008)

Prospective presenters and participants should send a 350 word maximum proposal to either P. Scott Corbett, scott.corbett@csuci.edu or Michael Powelson michael.powelson@csuci.edu by September 3, 2018 with the final version of papers due September 14, 2018.

There is no registration fee for faculty or student presenters and no fee for student attendees.

Details about registration, travel, and accommodations can be obtained from P. Scott Corbett, scott.corbett@csuci.edu, (805) 437-8970 or (805) 267-6131.

CFP – Close encounters, displacement and war

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Close Encounters in War Journal – n. 1
Call for articles
Thematic Issue: “Close encounters, displacement and war”

Close Encounters in War Journal is a peer-reviewed journal aimed at studying war as a human experience, through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches ranging from the Humanities to the Social Sciences. The second issue (n. 1) of the journal will be a thematic one, dedicated to the experience of displacement as a consequence of war and conflict, and titled “Close encounters, displacement and war”.

Wars in general are cultural phenomena, among the most ancient and deeply rooted aspects of human cultural evolution: investigating their meaning, by reflecting on the ways we experience wars and conflicts as human beings is therefore essential. Conflictis deeply intertwined with language, culture, instincts, passions, behavioural patterns and with the human ability to represent concepts aesthetically. The concept of “encounter” is therefore fundamental as it involves experience, and as a consequence it implies that war can shape and develop our minds and affect our behaviour by questioning habits and values, prejudices and views of the world.

Displacement is one of the most affecting consequences of war. Armed conflicts move people from one place to another, often trigging extensive phenomena of mobility that can influence societies in depth. The United Nations estimate that in the last few years 65 million people have been displaced by war and prosecution, whereas Malcom Proudfood famously calculated that no less than 60 million people were displaced from their homes during the Second World War and in its aftermath. Among them, there were those who had been forcibly deported by the Nazis, the soldiers who had moved with the armed forces and, most notably, a mass of civilians who became refugees.

Today, the refugee crisis represents one of the most urgent problems internationally, and it has a deep impact on political choices especially in Europe. Fleeing from combat zones has always been the only chance of survival for non-combatants, and refugees are among the most vulnerable groups involved in armed conflicts. Nonetheless, displacement can be multifaceted and not always explicit. Long periods of absence from home (e.g. as members of occupation troops or as POWs) may produce significant psychological and social effects on combatants, who would find it difficult to come back to their society, family and cultural environment. Fighting in colonial armies or being involved in civil wars, too, are sometimes perceived as cultural, social and moral displacement. On a broader scale displacement could trigger interesting phenomena of social, anthropological, cultural and transnational mobility capable of affecting national identities and shaping cultures.

Displacement is such a critical problem for modern societies that many institutions, scholarly or otherwise, commit to the study and research of migration from the ethical, legal and humanitarian point of view.

Issue n. 1 of CEIW Journal will aim to investigate displacement by exploring its facets both on a micro-scale, by studying individual testimonies and experiences, and on a broad scale by observing macro-phenomena of displacement throughout history with comparative, critical and cultural methodologies.

We invite articles which analyse the experience of displacement from ancient to modern and contemporary periods, from the perspective of the encounter, reaching beyond the study of military tactics and strategy and focusing on the way human beings ‘encounter’ each other with and within the experience of displacement. Contributions are invited to promote discussion and scholarly research from established scholars, early-career researchers, and from practitioners who have encountered irregular warfare in the course of their activities.

The topics that can be investigated include but are not limited to:
· Social impact of war displacement
· Displacement and transnational history
· Psychological aspects of war displacement
· Violence and trauma
· Cultural encounters and identity
· Displacement and colonial wars, civil wars, international conflicts
· War captivity and other forms of deportation
· Forced displacement, war crimes, ethnic cleansing
· Displacement and transitional justice
· Representations of otherness, race, and gender
· Religion and politics
· Testimonies, personal narratives
· Oral history and memory studies

The editors of Close Encounters in War Journal invite the submission of 300 words abstracts in English by 1st June 2018. Decisions will be made by 30th June 2018 and the completed articles (6000-8000 words including footnotes, bibliography excluded, in English) will be expected by 1st November 2018. All contributions will go under a process of blind peer-review.

Abstracts can be sent to: simona.tobia@closeencountersinwar.com and gianluca.cinelli@closeencountersinwar.com