CMNH Occasional Seminar (online) Annemarie Majlund Jensen (Aarhus University, Denmark) 19th May, 6pm to 7:30pm (online) All welcome. Book now The past presence – and present absence – of the British Army in Northern Ireland often reappears in accounts of the island’s transformation from a place ridden by violent political and sectarian conflict into a place now on the surface ‘normal’, as it were. In this context, how to tell a research story able to convey a perspective of soldiering during recent times of violent political upheaval? And how to understand what it is like to remember experiences of soldiering today, amid, on the one hand: ongoing contestation over how…

Live-Stream Links: Thursday, Sept. 23: https://youtu.be/6ohuRYLOQD8 Friday, Sept. 24: https://youtu.be/Mnnaeiz2T0A Ever since Homer opened the urtext of Western literature with the famous line “Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles,” war has been closely entwined with aesthetics. Both before, during, and after armed conflict, art and aesthetics have been a driving force in producing and inducing responses to war, oftentimes calibrating the sensuous apparatuses of populations in ways that aided the war effort, while sometimes also offering a set of counter-narratives and affects. The close bond between war and aesthetics has become ever tighter during the 20th and 21st centuries. The conquering of the perceptual field, to quote Paul…

Online conference, hosted by Durham University 12-16 July 2021 . The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. George Orwell, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1943) Writing in 1943, George Orwell reflected upon the challenges posed for both governments and intelligentsia by the rapid growth in wartime propaganda production. If the British government had begun the war ‘with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it […] after three years…

19th-20th July 2021 Hosted by the IWM Institute for the Public Understanding of War and Conflict and the Cardiff University AHRC funded project ‘Strange Meetings: Enemy Encounters 1800-2020’, this event seeks to explore views of enmity and allegiance in modern warfare. The conference focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but we also welcome pro-posals relating to the nineteenth century which look forward to that era. We are interested in a broad, interdisciplinary range of approaches to experiences and representations of the enemy, with a particular focus on how the ‘other’ side is presented in museums, in first person writings, journalism, literature, art, performance, film and photography.  While the 1914…