Passchendaele Salute 2017, Fort de Seclin, 10 November 2017

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The Passchendaele Salute 2017, under the patronage of Mrs Janice Charette, High Commissioner for Canada will take place on 10 November 2017 at the Fort de Seclin, near Lille in France to hold a service of remembrance and fire 100 rounds to commemorate the centenary of the end of the Battle of Passchendaele.

It will consist of at least 10 Great War guns drawn by horses:

4 x 18pdrs; 3 x 13pdrs; one 4.5 Howitzer, 2 French 75s and a 13pdr A/A gun on a Pierce Arrow 1917 lorry, and guns from a French museum. The guns will be manned by teams from UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and France.

Participants are all volunteers.

Combat Stress is the beneficiary charity.

There has been a change of plan with regard to the venue for the Salute because of the ongoing security issues in Belgium, our partners there have advised that the location cannot be guaranteed.

The owners of Fort de Seclin have kindly offered us the opportunity to hold the salute there and the French authorities are in full agreement.

We think this is an excellent alternative to the original plan and will enable us to press ahead with arrangements with greater confidence.

In all other respects details of the Salute are unchanged and I will keep you informed as things progress.

Further information here.

Free War Memorials Workshop, 1 March 2017, Oxford

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It is over two years since the Prime Minister announced a national programme to survey and restore many of the country’s First World War memorials and about 18 months since the First World War Memorials Programme began.

Since then, dozens of workshops have been held across the country to inspire action and encourage communities to save their local war memorial. An estimated 10,000 war memorials are at risk and there is no complete database of all the country’s war memorials and their current condition. Civic Voice wants to change this.

Civic Voice, the national charity for the civic movement, would like to invite you to a FREE workshop being held at the OXFORD QUAKER MEETING HOUSE, 9.45AM – 1.00PM ON WEDNESDAY MARCH 1ST. Come and find out more about the programme and how you can identify and record the condition of your local war memorials. From the workshop you will gain:

Background information about the programme
Training to undertake a simple condition survey
Training on how to record survey results on the War Memorials Online website
Information about funding for war memorial repairs and conservation
A resource pack containing all the necessary information to get you started.

For more details and to reserve your free place at the workshop visit:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/war-memorials-condition-survey-workshop-oxford-tickets-28330138206
or contact Civic Voice on 0151 707 4319 or email info@civicvoice.org.uk

For further information please contact:
Anna Wilson
Senior Development Officer (War Memorials)
Civic Voice
60 Duke Street
Liverpool
L1 5AA
E: Anna.wilson@civicvoice.org.uk

Posted in WW1

CfP: In-Between Empires: Trans-imperial History in a Global Age

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Venue: Freie Universität Berlin, September 15-16, 2017

Organizers: Daniel Hedinger (LMU Munich), Nadin Heé (FU Berlin and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) and Satoshi Mizutani (Doshisha University)

By focusing on spaces “in-between” empires – their connectivity, cooperation, and competition – this workshop aims at establishing a trans-imperial approach to the history of empires.

Many studies have focussed on entanglements between colonies and metropoles, but much less is known about trans-imperial dimensions of the game. On an empirical basis, inter-imperial perspectives, which compare several empires or consider competition between them, have become more important lately. Yet, such studies are scattered and this kind of research remains in its infancy. We still lack an overarching theoretical-methodological framework with which to address the spaces in-between empires. In other words: whereas national history has been transnationalized in the past decades, the same does not hold true for the history of empires. Thus, we would like to address the current state of research and at the same time ask how a future trans-imperial history could look.

The workshop, to be held in Berlin in September 2017, will bring together an international group of scholars who have focused on one or more imperial dimensions of one of the following empires: British, French, Russian, Austria-Hungary, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Ottoman, Chinese, as well as the US-American empire. Their contributions should discuss how transcending perspectives can change the perception of the empires they are specialized in, but also discuss possibilities and limits of a trans-imperial approach for the historiography per se. The focus will be on the years between 1850 and 1945.

Please note that we conceive of the Berlin workshop in September to be a ‘publication workshop’ – a workshop with relatively few but high-profile experts that enables not only in-depth discussion, but that will also result in a publication. More precisely, we intend to publish contributions based on papers (6000-7000 words) presented at the workshop in an edited volume in near future.

Travel and accommodation expenses of all participants will be paid by the organizers.

Please submit abstracts (250-300 words) by March 15 by emailing the organizers:
Daniel Hedinger hedinger.daniel@gmail.com
Nadin Heé nadin.hee@fu-berlin.de
Satoshi Mizutani mizutanis0606@gmail.com

Further information here.

CfP: Cities on the Move: Turkey and Yugoslavia in the Interwar Period

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Third Balkan Visual Meeting, 14-16 September 2017, University of Basel

Yugoslavia and Turkey are two nation states which emerged at the end of World War I on the remains of the Ottoman (and in case of Yugoslavia, partly of the Habsburg) Empire. One was a monarchy formed at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918, with the former King of Serbia becoming the King of a ‘three-named nation’ of South-Slavs. The other, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was forged under the conviction that the Ottomanist policy of the last Sultans had failed and that the Anatolian ‘heart’ of the former empire was therefore to become exclusively Turk. The founding of the two new states triggered a dynamic development especially in the large cities, where the new regimes first implemented their nation building projects.

The Third Balkan Visual Meeting (14-16 September 2017, University of Basel) will look at these developments from a visual approach and explore how urban landscapes and everyday life in these cities changed under the new national order, addressing the following issues:

1. The city centre as a showcase of progress and modernity
2. The old çarşı/čaršija between neglect, nostalgia, and reform
3. Nationalist ‘Zeitgeist’: Nation and Body in the city
4. From subject to citizen: Gender, body and dress
5. Leisure and holidays
6. Workers and poverty relief
7. Art and Urban Planning
8. The ruler in the city: Progress, Repression, Neglect?

The main focus is on the cities which are under investigation in the ongoing Basel SIBA project: Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade, Ankara, but also other cases are welcome. The SIBA project explores the cities named above through the photographic lens of local press reporters and press reports in large daily newspapers such as ‘Politika’, ‘Vreme’, ‘Cumhuriyet’ and ‘Akşam’ (see https://nahoststudien.unibas.ch/en/research/siba/).

Please submit your paper proposal, including name and affiliation, paper title, an abstract of up to 300 words and a short academic bio, to Yorick Tanner (yorick.tanner@unibas.ch) by 26 February 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by 12 March 2017. We plan to publish a selection of papers in an edited volume on the visual history of the Balkans and Anatolia.

CfP: European Academy of Religion 2017, Ex Nihilo Zero Conference

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Bologna, Sunday June 18–Wednesday June 21, 2017

The purpose of the conference—which will precede the first Convention to be held in March 2018—is to test the initiative of a European Academy of Religion as a research platform and as a network of networks. Fscire will host the conference and be in charge of all its organizational aspects.

The Scientific Program
All the academies and associations, departments and research centers, scientific journals and publishers working in the vast area of EU and Mena Countries as well as the Balkans, Caucasus, and Russia who are willing to participate in this conference are kindly asked to submit proposals for panels and disputationes by February 24, 2017.

Scholars and groups of scholars are invited to present individual papers or panels. Societies or groups who want to hold their own meetings and conferences during the “Zero Conference” are also welcome.

Proposal templates are available in the Download Area at www.europeanacademyofreligion.org and should be sent to eu_are2017@fscire.it.

Further information here: eu_are2017_Call for proposals

WW1 Centenary blog: Tagore in the time of war 1913-1919, by Sneha Reddy

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Ideas and influence of poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore during the first world war
Marking 100 years of Tagore’s lectures, delivered in Japan and USA, published in 1917 under the title ‘Nationalism’

‘Although Tagore is best known for his poetry, he was also an accomplished novelist, artist, dramatist, essayist and made prolific music compositions. His work gained international prominence just as the winds of nationalism and mutual distrust swept across the European continent and morphed into a conflict in 1914. The poet saw the oncoming war as an assault on humanity and explored its political and cultural consequences through his writings. European intellectuals and literary figures who witnessed the war’s brutality at their shores sought ‘insights coming from elsewhere’ and for many, Tagore’s voice ‘fit the need splendidly’ (Sen 2011).’

Full article here.

Sneha Reddy is a first-year PhD student at the School of International Relations in the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland. Her research focuses on French North African and British Indian soldiers in the First World War in the Middle East. She is on twitter @sneha_tumu

Lecture: ‘The Bush, the Suburbs and the Long Great War. A Family History’, Magdalen College Oxford

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Daubeny Laboratory, Magdalen College
Wednesday 15 February (5th week) 12:30-1:45pm

Professor Michael Roper (University of Essex) ‘The Bush, the Suburbs and the Long Great War. A Family History’
Centre for the History of Childhood Seminar

Directions: the door is between Rose Lane and the Botanic Garden entrance, on the other side of the High Street from Magdalen porters’ lodge. If you’re not sure where to go, please meet at the Magdalen porters’ lodge at 12:25.