Category Archives: Research

RAI Book Launch: Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin

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23 November, 17:00-18:30

Rothermere American Institute book launch and wine reception

Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Nottingham)
Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin

Details about her book here.

For self-made artist and soldier Horace Pippin — His ability to transform combat service into canvases of emotive power, psychological depth, and realism showed not only how he viewed the world but also his mastery as a painter. In Suffering and Sunset, Celeste-Marie Bernier painstakingly traces Pippin’s life story of art as a life story of war.

Illustrated with more than sixty photographs, including works in various mediums—many in full color—this is the first intellectual history and cultural biography of Pippin, a pioneering African American artist who served in the 369th all-black infantry in World War I until he was wounded. The war defined much of his life and work. The Great War, Pippin wrote, ‘brought out all the art in me.’ Working from newly discovered archives and unpublished materials, Bernier provides an in-depth investigation into the artist’s development of an alternative visual and textual lexicon and sheds light on his work in its aesthetic, social, and political contexts.

Celeste-Marie Bernier was a Visiting Professor in Oxford in 2013 at the RAI and at Wolfson.​ ​S​he has since held appointments at Harvard, Memphis and King’s College, London.

THE book review: Geert Buelens on the poetry of the Great War

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Times Higher Education‘s book of the week is Geert Buelens’ Everything to Nothing. Deborah Longworth provides a review of this study of the interrelation of politics and poetry.

Everything to Nothing: The Poetry of the Great War, Revolution and the Transformation of Europe
By Geert Buelens
Translated by David McKay
Verso, 400pp, £20.00
ISBN 9781784781491 and 1507 (e-book)
Published 2 November 2015

For the THE review, please see here.

Article by Alice Kelly: An unknown First World War story by Edith Wharton

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Dr. Alice Kelly, Postdoctoral Writing Fellow on the Women in the Humanities Programme at TORCH has had an article published in the Times Literary Supplement on her research into an unknown First World War story by Edith Wharton. The story is about Wharton’s anxieties about women in wartime and, more generally, about the broadening the canon of women’s First World War writing.

A link to the Times Literary Supplement article is here.

A link to Oxford’s Arts Blog is here.
The work has also been included The New Criterion’s Critic’s Notebook – see here, in The Atlantic – see here, in Jezebel – see here, and in The Smithsonian’s Smart News – see here.

Oxford DNB: First World War biographies released

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The latest update to the Oxford DNB, a History Faculty project, has been released, includes 30 new entries on figures connected with the First World War, and the events of 1915 in particular.

The authors are drawn from around the country, and beyond, but two entries on classical music composers who died in the conflict, Cecil Coles and Ernest Farrar, are contributed by Rachel Moore of New College, and Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music, The Bodleian Libraries, where Farrar’s papers are preserved.

Further details are on the front page at www.oxforddnb.com.

Jesus College graduate scholarship, linked with GLGW

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Jesus College, Oxford Graduate Scholarship, generously funded by members of Jesus College History alumni.

This scholarship is linked to the TORCH network Globalising and Localising the Great War (GLGW) project, History Faculty, University of Oxford, for research on the First World War.

We wish to encourage applications for proposed doctoral theses to be based in the History Faculty that relate to the main project areas of GLGW:

• The Global-Imperial Dimension
• The Economics of War and Peace
• Global War and World Religions
• Military Law and Military-Civil Relations
• Global Cultural Representations of Conflict

When making the application it would be helpful to use the phrase ‘This proposed topic would fit with the Globalising and Localising the Great War Programme’ in the thesis proposal and to mention a member of the Programme as a prospective supervisor. We would wish particularly to encourage transnational and comparative projects, and would also welcome interdisciplinary projects.

Eligibility – Home/EU applicants
Value – Jesus College funds University and college fee, and full living expenses
Duration – up to four years (depending on period of fee liability)
Application – via University application form for graduate study by the January 2016 application deadline

For more information on Jesus College, see here.
For more information on the History Faculty, see here.
To apply, see the University of Oxford Application Guide here.

We hope to be able to contact successful candidates by 1 May 2016.

New book: Britain, Northern Rhodesia and the First World War: Forgotten Colonial Crisis

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A new book, by Edward James Yorke, entitled Britain, Northern Rhodesia and the First World War: Forgotten Colonial Crisis (with a foreword by Professor Sir Hew Strachan), was published by Taurus / Macmillan in June 2015.

Reclaiming material memories of the First World War through ALS: a Prisoner of War Camp in Czersk, Poland

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For researchers interested in archaeology and the First World War, please see here for a poster, which presents the results of reclaiming material memories of the Prisoners of War Camp (PoW), run by the Germans during the First World War in Czersk (Poland) using ALS data and its derivatives.

Further information on this work can be found in:
Kobiałka D., Kostyrko M., Kajda K., 2015, Inconspicous and forgotten material memories of the First World War: the case of a PoW camp in Czersk, Poland [in:]Zalewska A., Scott J., Saunders N. (eds) Archaeology as a Medium of Reconciliation. Modern Conflict Archaeology (1914-2014), in press.