Tag Archives: Egypt

CfP: Imperial Legacies of 1919

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CFP Deadline for Papers and Panels: December 31, 2018
Contact: imperial1919unt@gmail.com
Conference Date: April 19-20, 2019

Roundtable participant proposal deadline: 31 January 2019
Undergraduate Student Poster competition proposal deadline: 15 February 2019

Journalist and author Shrabani Basu will provide a distinguished lecture on Indian soldiers related to her recent work: For King and Another Country (2015). Prior to the conference, she will also host a screening of Victoria and Abdul, a film based on her book of the same name. Historian of the British Empire Dr. Susan Kingsley Kent will provide the keynote address. Her esteemed works include Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 (2009); The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (2011) and The Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 (2012).

Conference Description
The year 2019 is the perfect opportunity to analyze the global consequences of war and peace. That year marks the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles, which set the terms for peace after the First World War. Unfortunately, the meaning of “peace” was dictated largely by European Empires with limited visions for avoiding future conflict, not only in Europe but around the world. This conference will commemorate the 1919 centenary by hosting an international 2-day conference that explores the on-going legacies of war and imperialism.

Shifting our lens to colonial spaces and debates, “Imperial Legacies of 1919” explores the multiple and contending meanings of 1919. In South Asia, for example, the year 1919 was not known for international peace treaties but rather the 1919 Amritsar Massacre during which a British officer commanded troops to open fire on an unarmed crowd. This gave leading figures such as Mohandas Gandhi the moral imperative to fight against colonialism. At the same time, the year 1919 connotes important moments in anti-colonial revolutions in places like Ireland and Egypt. Meanwhile, strikes and labor activism intensified around the world in response to the Bolshevik revolution (1917) and the return of soldiers to the home front. Soldiers, veterans, and civilians coped with wartime traumas, postwar disabilities and demobilization well beyond 1919.

The terms of peace and creation of the League of Nations mandates led to the dismantling of the German, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. This meant redrawing international borders, including in the Near East, in what became known as the “Middle East” in the United States. Aerial warfare in the League of Nations mandates and during the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) targeted civilians with ongoing violence across the imperial world. Pan-Asian, Pan-African, Pan-Islamic and anti-colonial activists attempted to find alternative sources of unity to challenge European imperialism.

While the year 1919 holds an important place in world history, issues such as economic inequality, unstable border relations, religious and linguistic identities, veteran and civilian relations, gender inequality, and the long-term traumas of war remain harsh realities for people around the world. This conference will be a timely reflection on pressing global issues that link past and present.

Paper and Panel CFP (Deadline December 31, 2018): The conference organizers welcome individual paper or full panel submissions from junior and senior scholars at any stage of their academic career. We welcome proposals for both conventional 3-4 person panels and those that offer an unconventional approach to panel organization. Papers and panels may be on any region, theme, and topic related to “imperial legacies of 1919” but we especially welcome reflections on the following themes:

Borderlands, Labor, and Migration
Gendering War and Peace
War Psychology, Health, and Trauma
The League of Nations Mandate System
Crypto-Colonialism
Environment and Empire
Capitalism and Imperialism
Language and Identity
Anti-colonial and peace movements
Food, war, and empire
War Reporting, Media, and Memory

Those interested in presenting an individual paper should send a 250-word abstract and current CV by December 31, 2018 to imperial1919unt@gmail.com.

Prospective panels should send a 200-word panel abstract, 150 word abstracts for each paper, CVs for each panelist, and, if available, names of prospective chairs and commentators. Deadline: December 31, 2018.

Graduate Student Roundtable CFP (Deadline January 31, 2019):
We will also accept proposals for graduate students who would prefer to be considered for inclusion on one or more graduate student roundtable(s) on any time period or theme related to empire (Deadline January 15). We especially recommend this for MA students, pre-ABD PhD students, or PhD students who are exploring a new part of their research. Priority will be given to roundtable participants who engage with the themes of “identity and empire” or “war and empire.”

Graduate students who wish to be considered for the graduate student roundtable session should send a 100-200 word abstract for a 5-10 minute presentation that gives a general outline of what the scholar would like to contribute to a roundtable on war and empire. According to the AHA “The roundtable format—which can be used for the presentation of original research, work-in-progress, or discussion of professional concerns—offers short presentations, a fluid organization (not limited to the chair/presenter/commentator structure), and ample time for discussion with the audience. Roundtables foster a congenial exchange between audience and discussants.”

Graduate Student Ambassador: Kevin Broucke, UNT History, Military History Center Fellow

Undergraduate Poster Prize (Proposal deadline February 15, 2019):
Undergraduate students from all universities are encouraged to apply for a place in the undergraduate poster prize competition on any topic related to war and empire. All accepted and completed posters will be displayed at the conference.

Undergraduate students who wish to be considered for the undergraduate poster prize should send a 100-200 word description of their poster, with 1 to 3 sample images, related to any theme or topic relevant to this conference. For further guidelines on poster sessions please see: https://www.historians.org/annual-meeting/resources-and-guides/poster-resources/effective-poster-presentations Deadline for consideration: February 15, 2019

Undergraduate Student Ambassador: Savannah Donnelly, UNT History

About UNT
The conference will be hosted in the new, state-of-the-art, Union facilities at the University of North Texas. UNT is a tier-1 research university of over 35,000 students in the Dallas-Forth Worth Metropolitan area. We are conveniently located in Denton, about 30-45 minutes from the DFW airport. Denton is center of arts and music with a growing independent restaurant scene in North Texas. The conference organizers welcome and encourage the participation of LGBTQIA+ presenters.

We will also host a screening of Victoria & Abdul and a Q&A with the original book’s author, Shrabani Basu, on the evening of April 18, 2019, for UNT and interested conference participants and members of the public.

Registration Fees
Thanks to the generous support of the Charn Uswachoke International Development Fund, the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, UNT-International and the UNT departments of History, Linguistics, Anthropology, Political Science, English and Women’s and Gender Studies, we will be able to offer discounted registration to all presenters and participants. Travel assistance is not available.

UNT undergraduate and graduate students: Free registration for panels, film screening and keynote (registration required, meals not included)

UNT Faculty in History, Anthropology, Political Science, English, Linguistics, WGST: Free registration for panels, film screening, and keynote (registration required, meals not included)

Non-UNT undergraduate and graduate students: $25 (includes all panels, invited talks, and conference meals)

Under-employed researchers/post-doc/early career: $40 (includes all panels, invited talks, and conference meals)

Tenured associate professors or equivalent: $60 (includes all panels, invited talks, and conference meals)

Full professors: $75 (includes all panels, invited talks, and conference meals)

“Conference meals” include one lunch and one dinner and are included with paid registration.

Please send all questions, inquiries, and proposals to imperial1919unt@gmail.com

New book: Dear Miss Walker. Gallipoli, Egypt & Palestine 1915-1918, Wartime Letters from Distant Fronts

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A new book by Toddy Hoare will be published by Helion & Company in early autumn 2018.

Reginald Hoare commanded the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars from 1905 to 1909 and was a senior brigadier-general at the start of the First World War, commanding a brigade of Yeomanry regiments including the Royal North Devon Yeomanry, which his late brother had commanded after leaving the Royal Navy, the Royal Devon Yeomanry, the Somerset Yeomanry, the Ayrshire Yeomanry, and the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, with other attachments. Throughout the war he continued to raise, train and fight this brigade at Gallipoli, in Egypt and Palestine, and finally on the Western Front in France during the second half of 1918, where he was wounded and invalided home in September. Before Gallipoli he wrote to Miss Walker, who was the daughter of a polo friend, and the correspondence continued up to their eventual wedding in October 1918 on his discharge from hospital. Dear Miss Walker includes a background to his pre-war soldiering and exchanges with a bumptious young subaltern, W S Churchill, who was in his winning regimental polo team. Through the social exchanges of the writer and recipient and their backgrounds leading up to their wedding this book provides an interesting social perspective, as well as a vivid insight into the fighting at the respective fronts and the doings of senior ranks on active service. Further insights have been gleaned from the respective Regimental Histories that were written after the First World War, and included where appropriate. Most of the photographs that illustrate this volume were taken by Reginald Hoare himself. Sadly he never spoke about his experiences to his children, so no other record or source relating to his campaigns exist.


Photographs reproduced with permission from Toddy Hoare. Copyright: Toddy Hoare.

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.