Category Archives: WW1

CfP: The impact of WWI on marriages, divorces and gender relations in Europe

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Conference and edited volume focused on the impact of WWI on marriage, divorce and gender relations

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, we would like to invite you to contribute to a project focusing on the impact of The Great War on the life-courses of “ordinary” citizens who lived through this war. The project we propose focuses on the impact of WWI on marriage, divorces and gender relations in Europe. As historians, sociologists and demographers, we seek to join both approaches into an endeavour that balances quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Call for contributions: impact-wwi_call_for_contributions

We plan to hold a conference on October 5 and 6, 2017 in Leuven, Belgium, and, subsequently, to join those presentations that are of high quality and form a coherent unity into an edited volume, for publication with an international high profile publisher.

We look forward to hearing from you by December 21 2016 whether this project appeals to you, and whether you would like to submit an abstract for the conference and/or the edited volume.

Contact: Dr. Saskia C. Hin, saskia.hin@kuleuven.be

If so, we will be happy to receive your extended abstract (2-3 pages) by February 1 2017. On the basis of the selected abstracts, we plan to approach publishers with the general idea of and the skeleton for the edited volume.

We are happy to let you know as well that we are able to provide one night in a hotel, dinner (Thursday) and lunch (Friday) for all speakers at the conference. Unfortunately, we are not able to cover travel costs.

The conference would start on October 5 (Thursday) in the mid-afternoon and end on October 6 (Friday) before dinner time.

Talk: Tait Keller, “Grim Fields: Militarized Environments of the First World War and the Making of the 20th Century.”

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Wednesday 7 December 2016, 11.00 to 13.00
OC1.01, University of Warwick

Tait Keller is an associate professor of History and former Director of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His research focuses on environmental change in times of crisis and conflict. His publications include, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering, Nature, and Nationhood in Germany and Austria, and articles in Annales, Environmental History, World History Connected, and the International Encyclopedia of the First World War. He is currently working on his next book project, A Global Environmental History of the First World War, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He earned his B.A. in History at the University of Rochester and his M.A. in German and European Studies and Ph.D. in History at Georgetown University.

Contact: Pierre Purseigle p.purseigle@warwick.ac.uk

Talk: Greece’s Megali Idea during and after the First World War

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Public Lecture with speaker Dr Marius Turda, Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University
Glass Tank, Abercrombie, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane site
Tuesday, 06 December 2016, 16:00 to 17:30

In 1844, the Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis (1774-1847), described Greece as a country that included ‘any land associated with Greek history or the Greek race’. This was the first announcement of the ‘Megali Idea’ (‘big idea’), a political philosophy that dominated Greek nationalist debates until 1920. The ‘Megali Idea’ was seen as the only symbol capable of uniting the two centres of Hellenism: Athens and Constantinople (Istanbul). If the War of Independence (1821-1829) succeeded in establishing the former, it was left to the new generation of nationalists, who matured around the end of the nineteenth century, to acquire the latter: “the great capital, the City, the dream and hope of Greeks.” These two centres of Hellenism played a conjoining role in shaping the ethos of Greek irredentist rhetoric during the Balkan and the First World Wars. As I will show in my talk, irredentist nationalists repeatedly argued that Greek culture and civilization could develop naturally only within the historical framework based on the intersection of these two points of national legitimization. As a result, irredentism reclaimed both the classical and the Byzantine traditions as constituent elements of a modern Greek national identity.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with The Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum and the Centre for Medical Humanities.

More information here and how to book:
Email: tgeorgescu@brookes.ac.uk

CfP: The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914

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The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914
An International Conference at the Centre for the Novel
Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, 6-9 April 2017

Plenary Speakers: Oliver Kohns, University of Luxembourg; Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh; and Steven Trout, University of South Alabama

The First World War was a very real event. However, since August 1914, authors have been writing their own versions of it. During the war, novels and short stories shaped public opinion about the conflict. After its close, fiction became a means of recalling and re-examining events. The war was ‘fictional’ in other ways too. Many supposedly truthful accounts of the war, whether in newspaper reports or in personal memoirs, were not as factual as they seemed. Wartime writing in combatant nations was heavily censored; post-war writing was often flawed by the passing of time and the experience of trauma. So, while the war of 1914-18 is often recalled through poetry, the fictions of the war offer challenging perspectives, and raise powerful questions about experience and art.

Proposals for panels and individual papers are invited by Friday 16 December 2016.
Please send to the Conference Chair: Professor Hazel Hutchison, University of Aberdeen: h.hutchison@abdn.ac.uk
More information at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/research/centre-for-the-novel-215.php

Conference flyer: ffww-call-for-papers

Exhibition: ‘Beyond the Western Front’, The Glass Tank, Oxford Brookes University

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Beyond the Western Front: Exploring Hidden Histories of the First World War
The Glass Tank, Abercrombie Atrium, Oxford Brookes University
Fri 18 Nov – Fri 16 Dec 2016

Please see here for information on the exhibition and to download the exhibition catalogue.

Tudor Georgescu (Oxford Brookes), in collaboration with Stephen Barker and the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum (Sofo), and the Centre for Hidden Histories at the University of Nottingham, present a special exhibition exploring the hidden histories of the First World War, as seen through the prism of the Ox and Bucks battalions’ experiences of the Italian, Balkan, Middle Eastern and Russian campaigns.

This exhibition goes beyond the well-trodden trenches of the Western Front, revealing a fascinating and intimate history of the First World War – one that also lucidly illustrates the global dimensions of WWI and our own role therein.

Three interconnecting sections investigate this rich legacy: The research projects conducted by the Sofo and Brookes volunteers that explore personal histories found in the museum archives; the artefacts on loan from the museum that are such impressive material legacies of the war; and the stereoscopic pictures converted to 3D anaglyphs that reinvent these remarkable images and make them accessible to a wider audience.

Ultimately, the exhibit aims to be an informal, engaging space in which to rediscover a remarkable perspective on the history of the First World War, and to encourage a conversation about what it means to us during the centenary commemorations and beyond.

Film screening of ’66 Men of Grandpont 1914-18′, Brasenose College, 22 November, 5:30pm – 6:30pm

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Tuesday 22 November, 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Brasenose College, Lecture Room XI

Free screening of ’66 Men of Grandpont 1914-18′, a 40-minute documentary film produced as part of an innovative community history project commemorating the 66 men named on the First World War memorial in St Matthew’s Church in Grandpont, South Oxford. The film outlines men’s experiences at the front and explores the impact of the First World War on one small and ordinary suburban community. It also describes Oxford during the period and emphasises the links between local and international history.

“Terrific; a very powerful piece of local history and some remarkable stories.”
Tom Buchanan, Professor of Modern British and European History, University of Oxford, May 2016

For more information on the project see:
http://www.southoxford.org/local-history-in-south-oxford/66-men-of-grandpont-1914-18

Watch a trailer of the film here:
https://vimeo.com/182242782

An exhibition about the 66 Men of Grandpont continues in the Cathedral at Christ Church until 25 November.

New article: ‘Frederick Coates: First World War Facial Architect’

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‘Frederick Coates: First World War Facial Architect’ by Dr. Marjorie Gehrhardt and Dr Suzanne Steele has just been published online in the Journal of War & Culture Studies. It will appear in print in January 2017.

The role of artists in the First World War is often understood only in terms of their artistic response to the conflict in paint, music, or sculpture. In fact, artists’ contributions were also engaged at an applied level, for example in the areas of propaganda, camouflage, and map-making. Beyond this, a small number participated in repairing the damage caused by the conflict. Frederick Coates, a British-born sculptor who emigrated to Canada in 1913, enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and worked alongside surgeons and other artists to try and help give new features to facially injured combatants. Drawing upon unpublished photographs and scrapbooks, this article investigates Coates’s war experience and his contribution to the reconstruction of broken faces. Through a close examination of this ‘facial architect’, as Coates was called, this article gives an insight into the work performed in maxillofacial hospitals and underlines the importance of cross-national, multi-disciplinary collaboration.

The authors hope that the article will promote a far greater understanding of the artist’s engagement with the war effort beyond camouflage, map making, and other more conventional war artist roles, and will broaden the field from one that, until this research, has primarily focussed on Harold Gillies, Tonks, and Derwent Wood et al. The research has revealed networks of collaboration, influence, and convergence within the artistic and surgical operations during the Great War.