A blog from Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand highlights the role of Maori soldies that served at Gallipoli, as an introduction to their exhibition Gallipoli: the scale of our war.
Workshop – Translating World War One: The Case of T. E. Lawrence
Workshop organised by Mary Bryden, fellow at the Paris IAS
Date et heure:
12/05/2015 – 09:30 – 17:30
Lieu: Institut d’études avancées de Paris, 17 quai d’Anjou, 75004 Paris
During the current Centenary of the First World War, we are commemorating the first mass industrialised war. If the number of victims was unprecedented, so too was the manner in which this quickly became a literary war. Amongst those caught up in the conflict were many who wished to describe this radical break with normality. Some of these narrations appeared in the course of the conflict itself, while others formed part of the second wave of war literature, between 1929 and 1930. The prevalent literary model is that of the muddy fields and trenches of the Western Front. However, this journée d’étude will concentrate upon the Middle Eastern Front and, in particular, on the person of T. E. Lawrence, whose war book Seven Pillars of Wisdom describes his participation in the Arab Revolt from 1916 to 1918.
Vacancy: Lecturer in the History of the First World War (E&S), University of Exeter
University of Exeter – College of Humanities
The College wishes to recruit a Lecturer in the History of the First World War (Education and Scholarship) to deliver the level 3 Special Subject modules HIH3410 and HIH3411, ‘The Great War: a Comparative History’, providing maternity cover for a colleague. This part time (24% FTE) post is available from 1st September 2015 to 30th June 2016.
Location: Exeter
Salary: £33,242 to £37,394
Hours: Part Time
Contract Type: Contract / Temporary
Closes: 16th April 2015
Job Ref: P48317
Further details: jobs.ac.uk
Lecture: Futurism, Fascism, and the Art of War
Futurism, Fascism, and the Art of War
Michael Subialka, Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature
St Hugh’s College, Oxford
29 April 2015, 5 pm, Taylor Institution Library, St Giles’, Oxford
The Italian entry into World War I was rooted in a complex mix of secret diplomacy, longstanding nationalist sentiments, and popular cultural provocation. One of the features of that mix is that it made for strange bedfellows and stranger combinations of beliefs even within single groups or movements. The Italian Futurists are no exception, and their years of provocation on behalf of intervention against Austria-Hungary (and in Africa) can be traced to a series of conflicting impulses that emerge out of the 19th century. In their thought, the basic irredentist cause of “completing” the Risorgimento’s unification of Italy is combined with the 19th-century discourse on vitalism, Darwinian visions of race theory and natural selection, and also an impulse toward the abstract, mysterious, and metaphysical, transposed from the realm of religion to human action and artistic creation. This blend of impulses makes the Futurist provocation emblematic both of the late 19th century and of the coming era of Fascism. It is in this light that we should approach the shift of alliances achieved by the Patto di Londra (Treaty of London), signed secretly 26 April 1915, nearly a month before Italy’s entry into the war.
All welcome. Lecture followed by Futurist book display and reception.
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association: Panel on WWI in Literature
In light of the centenary of World War I last year, this panel at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, New Mexico, United States, looks to reflect on the significance of the war as a cultural artifact. This panel explores representations of World War I both contemporaneously and as reflective literary and artistic process throughout the following century. All languages, literatures, film, art, and other representations will be considered.
Please submit abstracts ASAP to hillanna@isu.edu. Deadline: 20 March 2015.
First World War 100 at The National Archives
The National Archives has a range of resources on the First World War, including:
Online collections, including war diaries
Talks and events, including webinars
Learning opportunities
For more information, see here.
The National Archives: Prisoner of war interview reports 1914-1918
The National Archive records, in series WO 161, are reports on over 3,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners of war captured during the First World War.
The reports were made by the Committee on the Treatment of British Prisoners of War before the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. The Committee appointed examiners who conducted interviews with repatriated, escaped or interned prisoners of war to ask about how they had been treated. The examiners then wrote up the reports.
The reports include:
officers
medical officers
other ranks
merchant seamen and civilians (in a minority of cases)
Although the reports contain valuable information, they represent only a tiny percentage of the estimated 192,000 British and Commonwealth captives. They do not include the many prisoners of war who were liberated after the Armistice.