Call for Papers

While there have recently been a number of conferences and publications looking at land-based histories of the First World War, there has been relatively little consideration of the war at sea, its significance and its broader contexts. In the centenary year of the Battle of Jutland, "The First World War at Sea", jointly organized by The National Maritime Museum, The British Commission for Military History, and The British Commission for Maritime History, seeks to address this lacuna through papers that will address the breadth and complexity of the maritime sphere between 1914–19.

The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the Army Medical Department Center of History and Heritage will be co-sponsoring a conference on the medical history of the Vietnam War.

The chair for the “War and Culture” area at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association invites all interested scholars to submit papers on any aspect of the intersection of war and culture in literature, film, television, comics, and digital media; on cultural aspects of representation, mobilization, and memory in journalism, architecture, music, and painting; on American life and culture during wartime, etc. Especially encouraged are submissions on the culture of war protest, on conscientious objectors, deserters, and anti-war activism.

Die Zeitgeschichte befindet sich seit dem Ende des "Zeitalters der Extreme" (Hobsbawm) im Umbruch. Nicht zuletzt die neuen Gewalterfahrungen führen zur Neuorientierung einer Teildisziplin, deren Legitimation ursprünglich aus der Aufarbeitung der Weltkriegs- und Diktaturerfahrungen resultierte. Für die Neupositionierung spielt daher die Militärgeschichte nach 1945 eine wichtige Rolle.

This conference is planned as a follow-up to the two successful conferences, which took place at the University of Salzburg in 2010 and 2013. It will continue to build on areas previously investigated, and also open up new fields of academic enquiry.

The First World War resulted in an unprecedented range of encounters between peoples from different ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds. Soldiers from across the globe travelled to different theatres of war – Europe, the Middle East, East Africa, Egypt, Gallipoli – where they not only encountered fellow-soldiers and non-combatants with different languages, religions or customs, but also interacted with friendly or belligerent civilians.

In a seventy-year hindsight, August 1945 emerges as an epoch-making month and by far the most crucial turning point in the twentieth-century history of East Asia. But how exactly did Japan’s surrender affect the various processes that came to an end or began in that date? Is it possible to construct a meta-narrative of the various events and processes that occurred in 1945 and the subsequent decade?

In Europe, stories about war have always played a certain role in comics as a means of propaganda and glorification, but also of denunciation. Besides, comics represent transmission belts for memories, knowledge and images about war, by sometimes even going beyond what is allowed to be visualised. Thus, comics do not only feed the imagination on war, but they modify it at the same time - all the more in recent times since the amount of stories drawn on war keeps increasing, the range of topics, spaces and perspectives expanding and the propagation of stories across Europe intensifying.

Die blutigen Materialschlachten des Jahres 1916 haben die kollektive Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg in Europa nachhaltig geprägt. Sie stehen nicht nur für millionenfaches Sterben auf den Schlachtfeldern, sondern versinnbildlichen beispielhaft den Weg zum neuartigen, industrialisierten Massenkrieg. Dieser erfasste in ungeahnter Totalität gleichermaßen Front und Heimat, Politik, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft der kriegführenden Nationen. Zum Brennpunkt und geradezu Symbol in dieser Hinsicht ist in Deutschland und in Frankreich Verdun geworden.

Obwohl der Erste Weltkrieg als weltumspannender Krieg nicht die ganze Welt gleich getroffen hat, war die "Urkatastrophe" des 20. Jahrhunderts auch in den von direkten Kriegshandlungen verschonten Gegenden präsent und prägend. Wie aktuelle Forschungen zeigen, trifft dies auch auf neutrale Staaten zu, die in vielen Bereichen wie Kultur, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und humanitärer Hilfe eng mit den Kriegsereignissen verflochten waren. Damit existieren in allen Ländern Europas sowohl Erinnerungen an diese Kriegszeit wie auch zu Erzählungen verdichtete Kriegs-Erfahrungen.