The British Association for Local History and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies are organising a workshop about the First World War.
Experiences of World War One: strangers, differences and locality, will be held at the University of London on Friday 28th February 2014 from 9:30am to 4:15pm.Tickets cost £25.00.
The workshop will serve as “an introduction to researching war experience and its legacy: individual, family and community perspectives through the prism of the local, national and international”.
The workshop will consider the opportunities – in terms of interacting with new people, places and societies – provided by the conflict, and poses several questions which will be explored:
– How did local communities interact with colonial and Dominion troops?
– In what ways did racial issues impact on local community relations during the war, and in its aftermath?
– What relationships evolved between communities, hospitals where colonial/Dominion troops were treated ad individual soldiers?
– How might the war’s legacy be informed by ethnic minorities?
– During the war years, and after, how was the idea of Empire experienced, understood and imagined by people in British localities?
– To what extent did war change European colonial victors’ views of their extended Empires?
Programme
10:00am
Registration, and coffee/tea
10:30am
Welcome and introduction: Professor Philip Murphy, Director, Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS).
10:45am
Keynote: Dr Catriona Pennell (Exeter) on the relationship of locality to national and international events in the First World War.
Dr Pennell is author of A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (OUP, 2012).
11:30am
Local responses to ‘the other’:
1. Dr Suzanne Bardgett (Imperial War Museum): Whose remembrance? A study of available research on communities in Britain, and the colonial experience of the First World War.
2. Dr Richard Smith (Goldsmiths, University of London): Responses to Black and Indian soldiers in Britain.
1:00pm
Lunch
2:00pm
Localities, nations and Empire: Britain and Ireland in times of crisis, 1912-1922.
Professor David Killingray (Goldsmiths, University of London; and ICwS)
3.00pm
Using The National Archives colonial records.
Dr Mandy Banton (ICwS), author of Administering the Empire 1801-1968: A Guide to the Records of the Colonial Office in The National Archives of the UK.
(University of London IHR in conjunction with TNA UK, 2008).
3.45pm
Final discussion, and tea
Venue
The Court Room (Senate House, first floor)
Senate House
Malet Street
London, WC1E 7HU
To book tickets for the workshop, visit the Insititute of Commonwelath Studies website here.