Category Archives: Research

WW1 research competition

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TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and Academic IT Services have launched a WW1 research competition whereby they invite students, early career researchers, college/museum and library staff to submit proposals to present new perspectives on the War and its impact through either a blog post or short (audio/video) podcast.

They will support selected entries to develop their digital content which will then be featured on some of the University’s key channels, including Oxford iTunesU, Podcasts.ox.ac.uk, the Oxford Centenary Programme and World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings websites.

The awards will be judged by a panel of specialists on public engagement and WW1. Prizes will include an iPad Mini and the exciting opportunity to network with experts at the 2016 International Society for First World War Studies conference.

Deadline: midnight, 1 August 2016.

For more information, see here.
Download flyer: WW1 digital content competition promotional text- final(1)

Views of an antique land: Imaging Egypt and Palestine in the First World War

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Supported by the Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund Our Heritage programme, this University of Cardiff project will focus on collecting and making accessible images of Egypt and Palestine as they would have been seen by people during the First World War.

Much of the commemoration of the First World War has focussed on the Western Front and so gives the impression that the war was entirely one of mud and trenches with very little movement. However, the war in Egypt and Palestine was much more mobile and often fast moving, it was also fought in hot and dry conditions and posed a whole range of challenges to those who fought there. It is also a surprise to many that such a great number of personnel did actually serve in Egypt and Palestine at some point during the war with units regularly being withdrawn from the Western Front to serve in the area before returning to Europe later on. Egypt also served as a staging post for the Dardenelles Campaign and Thessalonika.

The aim is to collect photographs taken by service personnel, postcards, lantern slides and stereoviews. The project is not collecting the actual views but rather scans of them which, with the owners permission, will be uploaded to a dedicated website where anyone interested in seeing what their ancestors saw or who is interested in how the ancient monuments, cities, towns and villages looked during the First World War can get that information.

For a full overview of the project, see here.

New blog post for KCL’s Defence-in-Depth website

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Hanna Smyth, who is completing her DPhil on the relationship between Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites and identity, recently contributed to Kings College London’s blog Defence-in-Depth, Research from the Defence Studies Department. Her blog, ‘Identities set in Stone? The Delville Wood and Vimy Memorials as Sites of Hybridity’, can be accessed here.

New blog for Oxford’s WWI Centenary ‘Continuations and Beginnings’ website

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Hanna Smyth, who is completing her DPhil on the relationship between Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites and identity, recently contributed to the University of Oxford’s WWI Centenary ‘Continuations and Beginnings’ website. Her blog, WWI Memorials of the British Empire: Identity and Memory on the Western Front, can be accessed here.

CfP: “Science, Technology, the Environment, Engineering, and Medicine” (Russia’s Great War & Revolution, 1914-1922)

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Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922 (RGWR) is a decade-long, international, multidisciplinary effort generating new scholarly research focusing on Eurasia’s “continuum of crisis” at the dawn of the twentieth century. The project’s core participants comprise an international group of more than forty distinguished scholars. Since 2008 RGWR editors have been recruiting and selecting essays from scholars, academics, and exceptional graduate students from around the globe for publication and dissemination in a series of edited volumes being produced by Slavica Publishers.

To date, the two volumes addressing “Culture” and “The Empire and Nationalism at War” and the first book of the third volume “Home Front” have been published. Three additional “Home Front” books will appear by mid-2106.

RGWR Project Team members are interested in producing a stand-alone volume on “Science, Technology, the Environment, Engineering, and Medicine” (STEEM) and seek to identify individuals willing to contribute an original essay to the collection. Essays may involve any aspect of the history/culture of STEEM (broadly construed) across Russia and Eurasia between c. 1914-1922.

Younger scholars, including recent ABDs, are particularly encouraged to participate. Non-native English-speaking colleagues are welcome to submit their essays in their native language.

Deadline for the delivery of initial essay drafts is: 1 February 2017. Following the process of peer-review, revision, and editing the final volume is expected to appear by November 2018.

For more information about the project, please visit the RGWR website.

Further information and contact details here.

Summer School: The Face of First World War Battlefields and Battles

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Summer School for Graduate students: June 26th to July 2nd 2016, Péronne & Verdun

With financial support from the Conseil départemental de la Somme, the Mission du Centenaire 14-18, and the Office franco-allemand pour la jeunesse.

The International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, with its partners at the EHESS Paris, the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr, Potsdam and the Université de Picardie Jules Vernes invites applications for its summer school in Verdun and Péronne for graduate students working on the First World War or modern conflicts more generally.

Applications (in English or French) consisting of a 1-page summary of the candidate’s field of research [or: “research interests”] and a 1-page academic CV must be received before midnight on 15th February 2016 online: http://batailles2016.sciencesconf.org/?lang=en

Further information: CFP-batailles-Historial

New Book on Ethics and Literature of the Great War

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A new book on the First World War, Etica e letteratura della Grande Guerra: rappresentazioni della crisi (Ethics and Literature of the Great War. Representations of the Crisis) (Napoli, Marchese editore), edited by Patrizia Piredda and Gianluca Cinelli has just been published.

For further information, see here.