Category Archives: First World War

CfP: Motherhood, Loss and the First World War

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Senate House, London
5 – 6 September 2018

The extraordinary death tolls suffered on the fighting fronts of the First World War gave rise to unprecedented levels of loss for individuals and communities across Europe and the wider world. Indeed, bereavement became so widespread during the conflict that it can rightly be regarded as one of the defining experiences of the war. Historians have had relatively little to say about wartime loss, however, and the bereaved have not been widely acknowledged or remembered during the centenary commemorations of the conflict.

In order to shed light on this much-overlooked theme, a conference will be held at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London on 5 and 6 September that will bring historians and community groups together to explore maternal bereavement as a result of the war, an experience that was understood to be particularly painful and difficult to come to terms with. The conference will be held as part of an ongoing community project, Motherhood, Loss and the First World War, funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and led by Big Ideas, the London Centre for Public History and the Institute of Historical Research.

Proposals for papers on relevant themes in the form of 400-word abstracts should be sent to edward.madigan@rhul.ac.uk by 20 June 2018.

Download poster: CFP Motherhood Loss and the First World War

CfP: From War to Welfare: Global Perspectives since the Nineteenth Century

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Special Issue of Contemporanea

A large body of scholarship has shown how the experience of the two world wars in the twentieth century was a crucial catalyst for the creation of modern welfare states. However, war’s role in social legislation has yet to be conceptualized more fully. In mainstream comparative literature on the welfare state, war is typically considered a rare, anomalous occurrence that is conceived as a kind of exogenous shock, as an ‘abnormal event’, a ‘black swan’ emergency or a critical juncture. In this way, war has constituted a gray zone in the history of the welfare state. By contrast, the question of the origins and development of social protection systems has been viewed primarily in relation to processes of modernization or as an instrument for managing social conflict.

Nonetheless, recent studies of different national contexts have shown the fruitfulness of an approach that looks at the welfare state through the interpretative paradigm of the welfare-warfare link (for example: Scheidel 2017; Obinger–Petersen 2015; Castle 2010). Moreover, recent research has also highlighted how wartime conflicts involved planning processes that cast long shadows over the subsequent peacetime. Antecedent conditions and long-term social policy repercussions of war in postconflict periods must therefore be carefully analyzed, and from comparative, connective and global perspectives, in order to highlight the broader ways in which war and welfare have intersected in the past and over time.

This special issue of Contemporanea aims to reflect on the multifaceted causal links between war and the development of welfare states, which are conceived here broadly to include not only national social legislation but also the myriad of social programmes that flourished in the wake of war. We invite proposals that examine the welfare-warfare nexus over more than two centuries (19th-20th) and on a wide variety of geographic and political contexts (among them also colonial and post–colonial contexts). In particular, Contemporanea would welcome proposals focusing on the following topics as they relate to the welfare-warfare nexus:

Questions related to gender, sexuality and the family
Tax systems and equality
Public health and assistance
Risk and social insurance
Mass conscription
Labour legislation
And other topics that highlight how conflicts have served (or not served) as accelerators in the national and transnational debates on approaches to social protection

The proposals (600 words maximum) accompanied by a brief (2-page max) CV should be sent by August 15, 2018 to the editors Julia Moses (j.moses@sheffield.ac.uk), Ilaria Pavan (ilaria.pavan@sns.it) and Chiara Giorgi (mariachiara.giorgi@unipi.it) along with a CC to the editorial secretary (contemporanea@mulino.it). Responses will be sent by e-mail by September 30, 2018, and the selected essays must be submitted in their final form by February 28, 2019. All manuscripts will be refereed through a peer-review process (double blind). The special issue will be published by Summer 2020. Please note that all manuscripts should be submitted in English.

Contemporanea publishes contributions in Italian and English. For more information about the journal: http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/riviste/issn/1127-3070#presentazione. Contemporanea is indexed by: ISI Web of Science (Art & Humanities Citation Index), Scopus Bibliographic Database, Historical Abstracts, America: History and Life, Articoli italiani di periodici accademici (AIDA), Journal Seek, Essper, Bibliografia storica nazionale, Catalogo italiano dei periodici (ACNP), and Google Scholar.

CfP: Imperial Implosions: World War I and its Global Implications

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California State University at Channel Islands, Camarillo, California, and the History Department are pleased to announce that it will host a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on November 8th and 9th, 2018. The focus of the conference is Imperial Implosions: The Global Implications of World War I. We are looking for papers dealing with any aspect of the World War I in Asia, Africa, America, Europe, Latin America or elsewhere where there were significant historical implications and reverberations.

Featured speakers at the conference will be Professor Sean McMeekin of Bard College and the author of The Russian Revolution (2017) and The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2015) and Professor Pria Satia, of Stanford University and the author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (2018) and The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (2008)

Prospective presenters and participants should send a 350 word maximum proposal to either P. Scott Corbett, scott.corbett@csuci.edu or Michael Powelson michael.powelson@csuci.edu by September 3, 2018 with the final version of papers due September 14, 2018.

There is no registration fee for faculty or student presenters and no fee for student attendees.

Details about registration, travel, and accommodations can be obtained from P. Scott Corbett, scott.corbett@csuci.edu, (805) 437-8970 or (805) 267-6131.

CfP: State of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and World War One, SAH, Providence, 2019

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72nd Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians
April 24-28, 2019 / Providence, Rhode Island

CFP: State of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and World War One
Session Chairs: Erin Sassin, Middlebury College, and Sophie Hochhäusl, Harvard University

“Far greater than the infamy of war is that of men who want to forget that it ever took place, although they exulted in it at the time,” wrote Austrian journalist Karl Kraus in The Last Days of Mankind, revealing humanity’s abyss on the eve of World War I. With the centennial of the conclusion of the First World War approaching, we seek to reassess what this cataclysmic global conflict meant for architecture and urbanism from a human, social, and economic perspective.

Histories of design have often emphasized wartime advances in mechanization and standardization that opened new fields of inquiry in the aftermath of WWI and blurred the meaning of what constituted architecture. Yet, the war also prompted the rapid development of military-architectural knowledge impacting civilian populations at great human cost. As mechanized trench warfare came to the brink of collapse, hyper-development was accompanied by the re-emergence of systems of underdevelopment, including barter and subsistence economies, as well as mobile kitchens, field railways, and do-it-yourself objects made in the state of emergency.

In this session, we seek to imbed the formation of architectural networks and institutions (such as the Glass Chain or Vkhutemas) in broader histories of wartime architectural production advanced by governments, institutions, organizations, or citizens in order to interrogate the complex and often violent relationship between front and home front. We particularly welcome papers that address regions impacted by WWI beyond Western Europe analyzing how architectural agents and institutions mitigated, exacerbated, or actively resisted complicity in this human tragedy. We seek contributions that consider the impact of the ephemeral and the creation of makeshift architecture by women and children in the transformation of wartime urbanism. Finally, we encourage projects that engage economic theories of the war and relate them to post-war debates on cooperation, socialization, and democracy.

The 72nd Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians will take place on April 24-28, 2019 in Providence, Rhode Island. Submission of abstracts begins on April 3, 2018. Applicants will submit a 300-word abstract and CV through the online portal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Please do not send these materials directly to the panel co-chairs. Submission of proposals to the SAH online portal closes at 11:59 on June 5, 2018.

FWW Play: ‘Dear Chocolate Soldier’, SOFO, 6 June 2018, 19.00

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A new First World War play, ‘Dear Chocolate Soldier. A docudrama based on the letters (1916-1918) of Bombardier Edwin Hassall’, presented by Historia Theatre Company, edited and arranged by Kate Glover and directed by Kenneth Michaels will tour from 31 May 2018.

On Wednesday 6 June, it will show at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum (SOFO), Woodstock.

It is June 1916. A 6 year old girl, Joan Burbridge, watches as her father wraps up a packet of chocolate for the brave soldiers at the front. A thought strikes her: ‘How will the soldier know the chocolate is from me?’ Her father obligingly writes on the packet: ‘From Little Joan, Whiterock, Wadebridge, Cornwall’.

Six weeks letter, a green field envelope arrives, addressed to Little Joan. Inside is a letter, sent direct from the fighting at the Somme, by Bombardier Edwin Hassall of Leek, Staffordshire. The story of the letters, from ‘The Chocolate Soldier’ to Little Joan, takes us to Armistice, and is told movingly and amusingly, by three actors, in a cabaret style performance with poetry and popular songs from the period.

For further details of the tour and to book tickets, please see here and also download the poster: DEAR CHOCOLATE SOLDIER Leek and Tour Leaflet

Event: Seeing War: War and Cultural Memory

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Friday 25 May, St. Luke’s Chapel, TORCH, University of Oxford

The day will include a morning postgraduate seminar run by Laura Harrison, Rob Page, and Chris Kempshall, with readings circulated in advance. The afternoon includes a panel on Visualising War, with the photographer Jason Larkin discussing his project Past Perfect and the writer Robert Schultz talking about his collaborative project on memory of the American Civil War, War Memoranda. The keynote from Marita Sturken (whose work we read in our first seminar in Oxford) is on 9/11 memory, considering the the 9/11 memorial and the Flight 93 memorial comparatively. There’ll be a closing roundtable as usual featuring Mike Hammond. The venue this time is the lovely St. Luke’s Chapel on the Radcliffe Humanities site in Oxford.

The day is free and open to all and includes lunch, coffee and a reception. Please feel free to tweet about the event in advance using the hashtag #seeingwar

Registration is open; please register here.

Schedule
10.00: Coffee and Registration

10.15-12.00: Workshop led by ECRs – Rob Page, Laura Harrison, Chris Kempshall

12.00-13.00: Lunch

13.00-13.15: Opening Remarks – Alice Kelly

13.15-14.30: Panel: Visualising Conflict – Jason Larkin and Robert Schultz, chaired by Dominic Davies

14.30-15.00: Coffee

15.00-16.00: Keynote – Marita Sturken, chaired by Lucinda Borkett-Jones

16.00-17.00: Closing Roundtable – Marita Sturken, Michael Hammond, chaired by Alice Kelly

17.00: Wine Reception

For those of you on Twitter, check out the Twitter Takeover by Postgraduates and ECRs happening every week in the run up to this debate, featuring the Bright Young Things of war and memory studies. So far we’ve had week-long takeovers by Hanna Smyth, Louise Bell, Rob Page, Laura Harrison, and currently up is Jan Tattenberg. Still to come are Chris Kempshall, Eleanor Rowley and Doreen Pastor. Follow the conversation @cultcommwar

Call for Graduate Student Volunteers for an Oxford University WW1 National Digitization Project: Lest We Forget

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Lest We Forget is a nationwide initiative, based in Oxford’s Faculty of English, which aims to record the stories, objects, and memories of the First World War. As part of this initiative, we invite local schools, libraries, and museums across the UK to hold their own WW1 Digital Collection Days, where members of the public can bring in their First World War objects and stories for digitization. The documented stories and objects will be uploaded to a free-to-use Oxford University database, where they will be freely accessible to all members of the public to discover, research, and learn.

And we are looking for Graduate Student Volunteers to help us run these important events! (Graduate Students with research interests in the First World War are particularly welcome, as are those with broad interests in twentieth century history and/or literature more generally).

This is a great opportunity to add to your CV! You will gain excellent experience in public engagement, event organization, and even teaching (as our work often involves presenting to/engaging with students); you can also gain experience in graphic design, as we are always delighted to have new and creative poster ideas! You will also be among the first researchers to view countless incredible objects relating to the First World War—letters, medals, diaries, scrapbooks, photographs…)

Interested? Get in touch with us! at ww1collections@it.ox.ac.uk OR, by directly emailing Lest We Forget Project Manager Dr. Nancy Martin at: nancy.martin@linacre.ox.ac.uk