Category Archives: Events and Conferences

Workshop on the First World War and Global religions

Posted on by

Saturday 1 November at the Oxford Humanities Building.

This small informal workshop brought together participants from the Universities of Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, Galway and Exeter to examine the relationship between the First World War and two global faiths: Islam and Roman Catholicism. This was to mark the centenary of Pope Benedict XV’s first encyclical addressing the warring nations and the declaration of Jihad in Constantinople. The intention was to break down boundaries between historians of Europe and other regions and to provoke new ideas about the transnational and comparative dimensions of religion in wartime. The discussion was wide ranging and lively. In the morning the social and cultural dimensions of quotidian religious practice were considered both within the armed forces of the opposing coalitions and amongst civilians. The practical significance of the proximity of places of worship, of the ability to conduct religious ritual and the role of both formal and informal ‘chaplaincy’ was explored.

After lunch, attention turned much more to the political and intellectual significance of the war. The conversation produced interesting insights into the tendency to overstate certain political responses amongst religious believers at the expense of others. Whilst bringing out clear differences in the operation of theological authority between the two faiths the conversation also suggested that specific networks of believers were perhaps more significant than overstating the universality of response. The dialogue between nationalism and religion remains significant.

There was a general feeling that this was an interesting and productive exercise which hopefully can be further sustained by this network. A more complete report will be posted shortly.

We would like to thank the The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) for the venue, sandwiches and refreshments!

Engage: Bringing WW1 history into the present with Twitter

Posted on by

Thursday, 06 November 2014, 12:30pm-13:30pm, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN

Making First World War history accessible 100 years on can be challenging but social media has the potential to shed new light on what it means to remember. As part of the Engage: Social Media Michaelmas series Mechthild Herzog from the University of Luxembourg will be discussing her experiences of working in the team coordinating the Twitter project @RealTimeWW1: Tweets from 1914-18 which has aimed to make these connections possible. Come and learn about the ideas behind the project, how it developed, the challenges and subsequent lessons learnt when using Twitter in this creative way.

To book your place: http://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/ENAZ

Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood before Modernity: Old Debates and New Perspectives

Posted on by

Call for Papers: Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood before Modernity: Old Debates and New Perspectives

24–26 April 2015, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Oxford, UK

In spite of the stream of publications over the last thirty years on ancient and medieval ethnicity and national identity, the dominant paradigm in ethnicity and nationalism studies remains modernist – the view that nationhood is an essentially modern phenomenon and was non-existent or peculiarly unimportant before the 18th century. We believe it is time to reopen this debate. Scholars working on pre-modern collective identities too often avoid the challenge of modernism, either by using allegedly unproblematic terminology of ethnicity or by employing the vocabulary of nationhood uncritically. This conference, therefore, aims at tackling these difficult theoretical issues head on. This can only truly be achieved by bringing together a range of researchers working on ancient, late antique, early medieval, high medieval, late medieval, and early modern ethnicity and nationhood. Thus we hope to reinvigorate discussion of pre-modern ethnicity and nationhood, as well as to go beyond the unhelpful chronological divisions which have emerged through surprisingly fragmented research on pre-modern collective identities. Overall, the goal of our conference is to encourage systemic conceptual thinking about pre-modern identity and nationhood, and to consider the similarities and differences between the construction and use of ethnic and national categories both within those periods, and in comparison with modernity.

The conference invites paper proposals from prospective speakers in all periods of ancient, medieval and early modern history; sociology and social anthropology; and literary studies. We also warmly invite papers from modernists that aim to compare pre-modern and modern ethnicity and nationhood. Priority will be given to papers that situate their particular studies within the broader conceptual debate on pre-modern and modern identity.

Keynote lectures will be given by Caspar Hirschi, Len Scales, Walter Pohl, Susan Reynolds and Tim Whitmarsh. To stimulate discussion, these keynote lectures will be responded to by some of the leading experts on modern national identity and nationalism – Monica Baár, Stefan Berger, John Breuilly and Oliver Zimmer – as well as by Azar Gat, the author of a recent book on the long history of political ethnicity and nationhood.

Prospective speakers are invited to submit abstracts of approximately 300 words. Submissions should include name, affiliation and contact details. The deadline for submissions is 1 November 2014. For more information about the conference, or to submit an abstract, please email the organizing committee at ilya.afanasyev@history.ox.ac.uk or nicholas.matheou@pmb.ox.ac.uk.

We intend to publish selected papers from the conference as a special journal edition.

The conference is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

Organizing Committee: Ilya Afanasyev, Seth Hindin and Nicholas Matheou.

 

Twentieth Anniversary Conference of the Group for War and Culture Studies: The Past, the Present and the Future of War and Culture Studies

Posted on by

Call for Papers

Twentieth Anniversary Conference of the Group for War and Culture Studies: The Past, the Present and the Future of War and Culture Studies, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1, 25th and 26th June 2015

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Hilary Footitt, University of Reading, UK and Professor Bill Niven, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Established in 1995, the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS) celebrates its twentieth anniversary with a conference to take stock of the development of war and culture studies over the last two decades, to review what has been achieved and to set the research agenda for the short and long term future of the field.

The work of scholars associated with the GWACS is recognised as having played a leading role in developing new approaches to analysing the relationship between war and culture during conflict and its aftermath. War is no longer considered solely a military and political phenomenon but one, which to be understood fully, must be viewed through social and cultural perspectives as well. Research on war is now undertaken across an extremely diverse range of disciplines: cultural history, modern languages, sociology, media studies, literary studies, art history, fine art, cultural studies, memory studies, gender studies, as well in the more traditional fields of military and political history. At the same time the primary material of war studies has expanded: film, television, photography, song, theatre, poetry and other forms of literature, letters, postcards, diaries, autobiographies and memoirs, posters, landscapes, architecture… and more.  These approaches have changed the methodologies of war studies and this diversity has shown that the impact of war on individuals, groups, and nations is perhaps most fully understood only through the adoption of a ‘cumulative’ history. The accumulation of disparate and often competing interpretations and responses to war is necessary to this understanding which will be most productively enhanced when we further narrow the gaps between the military, technical, political, social, historical and cultural study of war. We still need to develop more adequate cross-disciplinary frameworks within which to analyse the extremely complicated phenomenon that is war, hence the need to look backwards and forwards in order to set the future research agenda.

Proposals are welcomed across the full range of research interests within the remit of the Group for War and Culture Studies and the Journal of War and Culture Studies:

  • the relationship between war and culture during conflict and its aftermath;
  • the forms and practices of cultural transmission in time of war;
  •  the impact of war on cultural production, cultural identity and international cultural relations;
  • the comparative, cross-cultural representation of the experiences of war and conflict in cultural productions;
  • Historical scope: wars and conflicts in the modern and contemporary periods (understood as the European modern era, late 18th century to the present day);
  • Geographical scope: wars and conflicts across world geographical and cultural areas.

Proposals of 350-500 words must be situated clearly within this remit and, beyond the particular object of analysis, must demonstrate a further reflection on the contribution of the analysis and the approach adopted to the continuing development of the broader context of war and culture studies.

Please note that as a major aim of the conference is to set the future research agenda, papers which do not extend their analysis in this way cannot be selected.

Selected papers, subject to the usual journal peer review processes, will be published in two special issues of the Journal of War and Culture Studies in 2016.

Deadline for receipt of proposals to the Organising Committee: 31st January 2015

Please send your proposal to Helene Scott, H.Scott@westminster.ac.uk by that date.

Scolma Annual Conference: “There came a darkness”: Africa, Africans and World War I

Posted on by

SCOLMA: UK LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES GROUP ON AFRICA

“There came a darkness”: Africa, Africans and World War I, The British Library, 17 July 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

The first shot fired for Britain in the First World War was from the rifle of an African soldier in West Africa. The last German troops to surrender did so on African soil, in today’s Zambia. In between African soldiers and civilians paid a heavy price in blood and lives and their societies and outlook were changed for ever. Recent scholarship, reflected in the commemorations and publications for the centenary of the outbreak of the war recognise that Africa was much more than a sideshow in a truly global conflict.

This conference will consider the role of scholars, libraries, archives and information sources in documenting and interpreting the African experience of World War I.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Campaigns in Africa
  • African soldiers on the Western Front
  • The impact of World War I on African Societies
  • Memory and Memorials
  • Literature, Images and Ephemera

Researchers, archivists and librarians are invited to submit abstracts for consideration for this conference.

Abstracts of up to 500 words may be sent to Terry Barringer at tabarringe@aol.com by 31 January 2015.

For more details see CFP section on this site, or go to: http://scolma.org