Category Archives: First World War

CfP: Artistic Expressions and the Great War: A Hundred Years On

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Hofstra Cultural Center, New York, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday November 7, 8, 9, 2018

To mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, this interdisciplinary conference proposes to explore the impact of total war on the arts from a transnational perspective, including attention to the Ottoman Empire and colonial territories. We are defining arts broadly – literature, performing arts, visual arts and media, including film, propaganda and other mass mediated forms.

World War I was the matrix on which all subsequent violence of the 20th century was forged. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their place in society, among them writers, performers, painters and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely. This conference explores the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day. We seek to examine how they dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in re-establishing creative traditions in the changing climate of the interwar years.

Keynote address: The Great War and the Avant-Gardes
Annette Becker, Professor of Contemporary History, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense

We invite proposals from a broad range of scholars in all disciplines on the following and related themes:
Individual artists
Art movements
Artistic expressions of wartime atrocities
Literature and art concerning the memory of the Great War
The artistic design and construction of war memorials
Gender and artistic/media expression
Mass media and the war
State intervention/censorship and artistic expression
Artistic strategies for sustaining creative activity during the war
Support of artists and artistic expression during the war
Artists’ national and international networks, their dissolution, reconstitution, or continuation before and after the war
Changes in performance practices during and/or after the war
The dynamic relationship between artistic expression and mourning in the postwar climate
The emergence of new gender norms and their impact on creative choices after the war
New directions for artists after the war
Artistic expressions in the colonial territories during and after the war
Artistic expression, racialization, and race politics

The deadline for submission of proposals is January 15, 2018.

Applicants should email a 250-word proposal and a one-page curriculum vitae to the conference director, Sally Debra Charnow, at sally.charnow@hofstra.edu. Include the applicant’s name and email address.

Conference Director:
Sally Debra Charnow, PhD
Department of History
Hofstra University
Hempstead, New York 11549

For more information, please contact the Hofstra Cultural Center at 516-463-5669 or hofculctr@hofstra.edu

CfP: 85th Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History

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The Society for Military History is pleased to call for papers for its 85th Annual Meeting, hosted by the University of Louisville’s College of Arts & Sciences and the Department of History in Louisville, Kentucky.

For the 2018 meeting, the program committee will consider paper and panel proposals on all aspects of military history, especially encouraging submissions that reflect on this year’s theme, Landscapes of War and Peace.

We will mark two particularly important anniversaries in 2018, the centennial of the end of the First World War and four hundred years since the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive conflicts in history. The program committee invites submissions that explore the outbreak of warfare and the difficult ways out of fighting and towards peace. Because the conference will be hosted in the heart of the Ohio country, locale of many early American conflicts, the program committee is also interested in submissions that focus on the geography, environment, and spaces of warfare.

Submissions of pre-organized panels and roundtables are strongly encouraged and will be given preference in the selection process. Excellent panel, paper, and poster proposals will clearly explain their topics and questions in ways that will be understandable to the broad membership of the SMH, not only to those interested in the specific topics in question. Additionally, the SMH encourages the representation of the full diversity of its membership and especially values panel and roundtable proposals that reflect the organization’s diversity of institutional affiliations, various career paths and ranks, gender, race, and ethnicity.

Panel proposals must include a panel title and 300-word abstract summarizing the theme of the panel; paper title and a 300-word abstract for each paper proposed; and a one-page curriculum vitae for each panelist (including the chair and commentator) that includes institutional affiliation, email address, and other contact information.

Roundtable proposals must include a roundtable title, the full names and institutional affiliations of each participant, a 300-word abstract summarizing the roundtable’s themes and points of discussion, and a one-page curriculum vitae for each participant (including the moderator, if any).

Poster proposals allow military historians (especially, but not limited to, graduate students) to share their research through visual materials. Proposals should clearly explain (in no more than 300 words) the poster’s topics and arguments, as well as how the information will be presented visually.

Individual paper proposals are also welcome and must include a 300-word abstract of the paper, and one-page vita with contact information and email address. If accepted, individual papers will be assigned by the program committee to an appropriate panel with a chair and commentator. Those who wish to volunteer to serve as chairs and commenters should send a one-page curriculum vitae to the program committee chair.

Participants may present one paper, serve on a roundtable, or provide panel comments. They may not fill more than one of these roles during the conference, nor should they propose to do so to the Program Committee. Members who act as panel chairs for only one session may deliver a paper, serve on a roundtable, or offer comments in a different session. Members who serve as both the chair and commentator of a single session may not present in another session.

All submissions must be made through the 2018 SMH Submission Portal. One person will need to gather all required information for panel and roundtable submissions and enter the information in the portal. Individual paper and poster submissions can be made by the individual. For questions about the submission process, please contact smh2018@louisville.edu.

All proposals must be submitted by October 1, 2017. All accepted presenters, chairs, and commentators must be members of the Society for Military History by December 31, 2017 to be placed on the conference program.

2018 SMH Submission Portal: www.smh-hq.org/2018submissions.html.
Further information here.

Conference: Nerves and War. Psychological Experiences of Mobilization and Suffering in Germany, 1900-1933

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12-13 October 2017, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Organized by Gundula Gahlen, Björn Hofmeister, Christoph Nübel and Deniza Petrova

´Nerves´ enjoyed a central place in German debates about war at the beginning of the 20th Century. Politicians, scientists, the public, and the military discussed the extent to which a future war would strain the nerves of German society. Concepts of ´strength of nerves´ as well as of ´weakness of nerves´ were increasingly used as combat terms during the First World War. The massive scale of experiences of psychological injuries and suffering only added to this phenomenon. The social and political administration of the medical treatment of psychological war disabilities presided over post-war discourses of managing the consequences of war. Simultaneously, a new spiritual mobilization for war followed in the Weimar Republic, which, after 1933, ´synchronized´ almost all aspects of social life in the Third Reich.

Current scholarship has devoted substantial historical research to the treatment and accommodation of psychological war-disabled veterans. This conference focuses on contemporary discourses on nerves in politics, society, science, and the military and aspires to elaborate the interaction as well as their practical consequences of these discourses for the period of 1900 and 1933. At this conference nerves are understood as a code and a construct that are central in negotiating identity. Both, contemporary discourses on nerves as well as individual and collective experiences of psychological mobilization and suffering will be presented and analyzed. The focus of the conference papers is on Germany, but in a wider European context.

Venue: Freie Universität Berlin, Fabeckstraße 23-25, 14195 Berlin, Room: 2.2059

Please register/contact us by October 5, 2017 at: dpetrova@zedat.fu-berlin.de

For further information please visit the conference website: www.nervenundkrieg.de

Call for Applications – Carnegie Council’s “The Living Legacy of the First World War”

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Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is now accepting applications for the World War I fellowship project, “The Living Legacy of the First World War.” Carnegie Council is creating up to ten fellowships to conduct projects involving original research, approaches, or methods on the American experience in the First World War and its impact and relevance in the modern world.

With this project, Carnegie Council aims to advance a vision of history that is diverse, dynamic, and inclusive. This approach begins with the selection of fellows of varying ages, backgrounds, and interests. In designing a research proposal, applicants are encouraged to draw on personal passions, integrating unique perspectives and insights into historical debates.

Selected fellows will research independently over the next year. Fellows will then share their findings and analysis in an article written for publication on CarnegieCouncil.org, in Ethics & International Affairs, or through another academic or popular publisher. In the case of graphic or other non-traditional projects, a written report may be substituted for an article. To reach a broader audience, the fellows will participate in a podcast interview series on CarnegieCouncil.org, where they will discuss their work. Fellows may also be invited to speak at other events associated with the centenary of World War I.

To apply, please submit a research proposal (1,000 words or fewer), curriculum vitae, and two references to program assistant Billy Pickett at bpickett@cceia.org by Friday, September 15, 2017. Proposals should include the following: the proposed research topic with background; the feasibility of the research; and the topic’s bearing on the present, whether in ethical debates, political discourse, governing institutions, demography, law, international relations, or other areas. Individuals of all nationalities are encouraged to apply, though articles and interviews will be published primarily in English.

Thanks to the generous support of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, fellows will receive a stipend to support their research.

For questions, please contact the lead administrator for the World War I fellowship project and Carnegie Council senior fellow, Reed Bonadonna at rbonadonna@cceia.org.

CfP: ISFWWS: Recording, Narrating and Archiving the First World War, Melbourne July 2018

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Monday, 9 July 2018 to Wednesday, 11 July 2018
Deakin Downtown, 2 Collins Square, 727 Collins Street, Melbourne

Following the success of the Oxford conference in November 2016, we are delighted to announce that the 10th conference of the International Society for First World War Studies will be held in Melbourne, Australia – our first to be held in the southern hemisphere!

We are thrilled that Professor Joan Beaumont of the Australian National University, and Professor Michael Roper of the University of Essex will be keynote speakers.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The ways in which contemporaries recorded the First World War have inevitably shaped the kinds of histories we have produced over the last century. The war was being recorded and archived as it happened – and for decades after – for particular reasons and particular purposes. The processes of recording and archiving have bequeathed in different times and places alternately a very rich, very partial, and very prejudiced record of conflict and its legacies.

This conference revisits the creation, recreation and transmission of knowledge about the war, especially in comparative and transnational frames. It encourages analysis of media presentations of the war during and after the fighting, the place of official and unofficial historians, networks of private knowledge, the development of oral histories, the work of family historians, collectors, archivists, curators and librarians, in order to understand how the war has been reconceptualised over time, and how the records of war facilitate or inhibit new perspectives.

Potential themes for conference panels and presentations are:

o Production, preservation and transmission of the records of war over time
o Archives, museums and the shaping of a record of war
o Military analyses and uses of the First World War
o Press, propaganda and the record of war
o Official and unofficial representations of war
o Family history and intergenerational transmission of the war
o Creating and accessing knowledge of war in a digital era
o Recording and archiving the centenary
o Fiction, film and popular consumption of the war

Submission Guidelines

Presenters will deliver twenty-minute papers followed by discussion. Proposals should be approximately 300 words in length. Applications should also be accompanied by a short biography. Panel proposals are welcome.

The working language of the conference and all submissions is English. The organisers intend to publish an edited collection from selected presentations.

Submission Email Address: fwws2018@deakin.edu.au
Closing Date for Submissions: 30 September 2017
Further information here.
Download call for papers: CFP Final

Event: Women and the army: 100 years of progress? National Army Museum, 24 June 2017

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National Army Museum, Royal Hospital Road, London, SW3 4HT
24 June 2017, 9.40am – 5.00pm

It’s 100 years since women were first allowed to perform roles within the British Army other than nursing. In light of this, we’re holding a conference to examine the evolution of women’s service in the military.

2017 is the ideal time for examining women’s involvement in the British military. It’s the 100th anniversary of women being able to enlist into non-nursing branches of the army. It’s also the 25th anniversary of the disbandment of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, which resulted in female soldiers being absorbed into the army as a whole. And just last year, women became eligible to serve in combat roles for the first time.

To mark these important milestones, the National Army Museum is holding a conference to review decades of debate around the role of women in the military, and to consider the roles they might perform in the future.

The conference will cover all aspects of women’s military service from 1917 to the present day, whether historical, operational, political, sociological or philosophical.

Conference programme here.
Further information and to book, see here.

Admission: £25.00
Concessions for students: £18.75
Ticket price includes lunch, tea and coffee. Any dietary requirements should be emailed to info@nam.ac.uk.

CfP: ‘Conscription and its Malcontents in the First World War’, St Peter’s College, Oxford, November 2017

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St Peter’s College, Oxford
17 November 2017

Applications are invited for a conference exploring the public reaction to conscription during the First World War.

Papers relating to Ireland, the British Dominions, the French and Russian Empires and the Central Powers are invited, as well as those relating to the Suffrage and Pacifist movements.

Although papers are invited dealing with any aspect of the public reaction to conscription, a key theme will be the reaction among groups peripheral to the main belligerents, based on geography, politics, religion or ethnicity.

Applications from PhD students and Early Career Researchers are particularly welcome.

Submissions are welcome from all relevant disciplines, and inter-disciplinary discussion is very much encouraged.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length, followed by 10 minutes of questions and answers.

Please send titles and abstracts (300-400 words) to Robin Adams by 15 August 2017
Email: conscription@history.ox.ac.uk

Download CfP: Call for Papers – ‘Conscription and its Malcontents in the First World War’