Following the success of the Oxford conference in November 2016, The International Society for First World War Studies is delighted to announce that their 10th conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia – the first to be held in the southern hemisphere. Professor Joan Beaumont of the Australian National University and Professor Michael Roper of the University of Essex will be keynote speakers. The conference will be hosted at Deakin Downtown, 2 Collins Square, 727 Collins Street, Melbourne on 9-11 July 2018.
This conference revisits the creation, recreation and transmission of knowledge about the war, especially in comparative and transnational frames. It encourages analysis of media presentations of the war during and after the fighting, the place of official and unofficial historians, networks of private knowledge, the development of oral histories, the work of family historians, collectors, archivists, curators and librarians, in order to understand how the war has been reconceptualised over time, and how the records of war facilitate or inhibit new perspectives.
The ways in which contemporaries recorded the First World War have inevitably shaped the kinds of histories we have produced over the last century. The war was being recorded and archived as it happened – and for decades after – for particular reasons and particular purposes. The processes of recording and archiving have bequeathed in different times and places alternately a very rich, very partial, and very prejudiced record of conflict and its legacies.
Potential themes for conference panels and presentations are:
- Production, preservation and transmission of the records of war over time
- Archives, museums and the shaping of a record of war
- Military analyses and uses of the First World War
- Press, propaganda and the record of war
- Official and unofficial representations of war
- Family history and intergenerational transmission of the war
- Creating and accessing knowledge of war in a digital era
- Recording and archiving the centenary
- Fiction, film and popular consumption of the war
Presenters will deliver twenty-minute papers followed by discussion. Proposals should be approximately 300 words in length. Applications should also be accompanied by a short biography. Panel proposals are welcome. The organisers intend to publish an edited collection from selected presentations.
Submission Email Address: fwws2018@deakin.edu.au
Closing Date for Submissions: 30 September 2017
For further details, please visit the conference website.
