CfP: The impact of WWI on marriages, divorces and gender relations in Europe

Posted on by

Conference and edited volume focused on the impact of WWI on marriage, divorce and gender relations

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, we would like to invite you to contribute to a project focusing on the impact of The Great War on the life-courses of “ordinary” citizens who lived through this war. The project we propose focuses on the impact of WWI on marriage, divorces and gender relations in Europe. As historians, sociologists and demographers, we seek to join both approaches into an endeavour that balances quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Call for contributions: impact-wwi_call_for_contributions

We plan to hold a conference on October 5 and 6, 2017 in Leuven, Belgium, and, subsequently, to join those presentations that are of high quality and form a coherent unity into an edited volume, for publication with an international high profile publisher.

We look forward to hearing from you by December 21 2016 whether this project appeals to you, and whether you would like to submit an abstract for the conference and/or the edited volume.

Contact: Dr. Saskia C. Hin, saskia.hin@kuleuven.be

If so, we will be happy to receive your extended abstract (2-3 pages) by February 1 2017. On the basis of the selected abstracts, we plan to approach publishers with the general idea of and the skeleton for the edited volume.

We are happy to let you know as well that we are able to provide one night in a hotel, dinner (Thursday) and lunch (Friday) for all speakers at the conference. Unfortunately, we are not able to cover travel costs.

The conference would start on October 5 (Thursday) in the mid-afternoon and end on October 6 (Friday) before dinner time.

Talk: Tait Keller, “Grim Fields: Militarized Environments of the First World War and the Making of the 20th Century.”

Posted on by

Wednesday 7 December 2016, 11.00 to 13.00
OC1.01, University of Warwick

Tait Keller is an associate professor of History and former Director of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His research focuses on environmental change in times of crisis and conflict. His publications include, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering, Nature, and Nationhood in Germany and Austria, and articles in Annales, Environmental History, World History Connected, and the International Encyclopedia of the First World War. He is currently working on his next book project, A Global Environmental History of the First World War, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He earned his B.A. in History at the University of Rochester and his M.A. in German and European Studies and Ph.D. in History at Georgetown University.

Contact: Pierre Purseigle p.purseigle@warwick.ac.uk

Talk: Greece’s Megali Idea during and after the First World War

Posted on by

Public Lecture with speaker Dr Marius Turda, Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University
Glass Tank, Abercrombie, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane site
Tuesday, 06 December 2016, 16:00 to 17:30

In 1844, the Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis (1774-1847), described Greece as a country that included ‘any land associated with Greek history or the Greek race’. This was the first announcement of the ‘Megali Idea’ (‘big idea’), a political philosophy that dominated Greek nationalist debates until 1920. The ‘Megali Idea’ was seen as the only symbol capable of uniting the two centres of Hellenism: Athens and Constantinople (Istanbul). If the War of Independence (1821-1829) succeeded in establishing the former, it was left to the new generation of nationalists, who matured around the end of the nineteenth century, to acquire the latter: “the great capital, the City, the dream and hope of Greeks.” These two centres of Hellenism played a conjoining role in shaping the ethos of Greek irredentist rhetoric during the Balkan and the First World Wars. As I will show in my talk, irredentist nationalists repeatedly argued that Greek culture and civilization could develop naturally only within the historical framework based on the intersection of these two points of national legitimization. As a result, irredentism reclaimed both the classical and the Byzantine traditions as constituent elements of a modern Greek national identity.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with The Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum and the Centre for Medical Humanities.

More information here and how to book:
Email: tgeorgescu@brookes.ac.uk

Talk: Malaria and the War beyond the Western Front

Posted on by

Public Lecture with Professor Mark Harrison, Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford
Glass Tank, Abercrombie, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane site
Tuesday, 29 November 2016, 16:00 to 17:30

This lecture will examine the British Army’s fight against one of its most implacable foes – the mosquito. In most theatres apart from the Western Front, malaria was an enormous drain on morale and military efficiency. It was by no means the only disease that led to heavy losses in theatres such as Salonika and the Middle East, but, along with venereal disease, it proved to be one of the most intractable. Wartime conditions worsened what was already, in many locations, an unfavourable situation as far as health was concerned. Preventive measures proved ill equipped to deal with these conditions, especially when troops were on the move. All armies suffered badly but ideas of racial immunity to malaria were used to justify the replacement of white troops in some theatres with ‘native’ troops from Britain’s imperial territories. This raised political tensions in territories such as India. The lecture will also consider the legacy of the war. The influx of many foreign troops, the destruction of infrastructure, and population displacement had a deep and enduring impact on the health of civilians.
About the speaker

Mark Harrison is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He has written on many aspects of the history of disease and medicine in relation to war and imperialism. His books include The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (2010) and Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War (2005), both of which won the Templer Medal Book Prize awarded by the Society for Army Historical Research. He currently holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award entitled, ‘Invisible Crises, Forgotten Histories: Malaria in Asia, 1900-Present’.

For further information, please contact: Tudor Georgescu (tgeorgescu@brookes.ac.uk) and see here.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with The Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum and the Centre for Medical Humanities.

CfP: The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914

Posted on by

The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914
An International Conference at the Centre for the Novel
Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, 6-9 April 2017

Plenary Speakers: Oliver Kohns, University of Luxembourg; Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh; and Steven Trout, University of South Alabama

The First World War was a very real event. However, since August 1914, authors have been writing their own versions of it. During the war, novels and short stories shaped public opinion about the conflict. After its close, fiction became a means of recalling and re-examining events. The war was ‘fictional’ in other ways too. Many supposedly truthful accounts of the war, whether in newspaper reports or in personal memoirs, were not as factual as they seemed. Wartime writing in combatant nations was heavily censored; post-war writing was often flawed by the passing of time and the experience of trauma. So, while the war of 1914-18 is often recalled through poetry, the fictions of the war offer challenging perspectives, and raise powerful questions about experience and art.

Proposals for panels and individual papers are invited by Friday 16 December 2016.
Please send to the Conference Chair: Professor Hazel Hutchison, University of Aberdeen: h.hutchison@abdn.ac.uk
More information at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/research/centre-for-the-novel-215.php

Conference flyer: ffww-call-for-papers

CfP: Mars and Minerva: International Artistic and Cultural Responses to War, Palgrave Macmillan

Posted on by

An edited volume, entitled Mars and Minerva: International Artistic and Cultural Responses to War, is seeking chapters from UK authors.

For further information, please contact Dr Martin Kerby (Martin.Kerby@usq.edu.au)

The editors are looking to group the chapters under the general headings of Commemoration (Chapters 2, 4, 6, 10, 14) Loss, Grief and Resilience (3, 12, 13, 15) and Identity (5, 7, 8, 9, 11). It will be a 12 month project so there is plenty of time to submit work. Chapters will be about 7000 words.

Current planned chapters:
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Chapter 2 – The Fabric of History: An exploration of the Bayeux Tapestry, Overlord Embroidery and the Boer Trekker Tapestry – Margaret Baguley
Chapter 3 – The Theatre of War: Translating War Horse – Janet McDonald
Chapter 4 – Touring the battlefields of the Somme with the Michelin and Somme Tourisme guidebooks – Caroline Winter
Chapter 5 – Children’s Picture Books: Conflict and Identity – Eloise Tuppurainen-Mason
Chapter 6 – A Fusion of Art and History: Dioramas – Martin Kerby
Chapter 7 – Do You See What I See? International Perspectives on World War II through Textbooks – Susan Santoli
Chapter 8 – Between Little Truths and Good Lies: The Use of Mythology in Second World War Narratives and Contemporary Art – Beata Batorowicz and Jason Castro
Chapter 9 – Indigenous Protest Art – Robert Barton
Chapter 10 – Australian War Memorials: An artistic interpretation – Malcom Bywaters
Chapter 11 – Landscape of War – Australian War Artists 1914 – 1918 – Margaret Baguley, Abbey MacDonald and Martin Kerby
Chapter 12 – Write propaganda, shut up, or fight: Philip Gibbs and the Western Front in 1917 – Martin Kerby
Chapter 13 – The Soldier as Artist: Memories of War – Michael Armstrong
Chapter 14 – Combat Cinematography and the Hollywood connection – Daniel Maddock
Chapter 15 – The Stamps-Baxter G. I. School – Dr Jeannette Fresne

Exhibition: ‘Beyond the Western Front’, The Glass Tank, Oxford Brookes University

Posted on by

Beyond the Western Front: Exploring Hidden Histories of the First World War
The Glass Tank, Abercrombie Atrium, Oxford Brookes University
Fri 18 Nov – Fri 16 Dec 2016

Please see here for information on the exhibition and to download the exhibition catalogue.

Tudor Georgescu (Oxford Brookes), in collaboration with Stephen Barker and the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum (Sofo), and the Centre for Hidden Histories at the University of Nottingham, present a special exhibition exploring the hidden histories of the First World War, as seen through the prism of the Ox and Bucks battalions’ experiences of the Italian, Balkan, Middle Eastern and Russian campaigns.

This exhibition goes beyond the well-trodden trenches of the Western Front, revealing a fascinating and intimate history of the First World War – one that also lucidly illustrates the global dimensions of WWI and our own role therein.

Three interconnecting sections investigate this rich legacy: The research projects conducted by the Sofo and Brookes volunteers that explore personal histories found in the museum archives; the artefacts on loan from the museum that are such impressive material legacies of the war; and the stereoscopic pictures converted to 3D anaglyphs that reinvent these remarkable images and make them accessible to a wider audience.

Ultimately, the exhibit aims to be an informal, engaging space in which to rediscover a remarkable perspective on the history of the First World War, and to encourage a conversation about what it means to us during the centenary commemorations and beyond.