War Poets Collection lecture: Prof Alison Fell
Nov 13, 2023
Description
Glorifying Women: Remembering Women’s Roles in the First World War
After the Armistice, the British nation in mourning was most often represented by a grieving widow or mother. War commemoration tended to set in stone a traditional understanding of women as the passive observers of war, crowning ‘distant ardours’ and mourning ‘laurelled memories’. Yet not only did thousands of women actively respond to and participate in the rites and rituals of commemoration, but they also instigated, planned, designed and sculpted memorials and ceremonies. Further, some women saw themselves as having been on ‘active service’, and therefore as members of a ‘war generation’ who had more in common with the bitter soldier persona of Sassoon’s poem than with other non-combatants. This talk will examine a broad range of war memorials and commemorative activities, arguing that while many adhered to a traditional gendered view of wartime sacrifice, others offered a very different interpretation of the war and its devastating losses.
Professor Alison Fell is Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on women and war, particularly the First World War, including edited books on the women’s movement and nurses, and two recent monographs published by Cambridge University Press: Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War (2018) and Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women c.1850-1945 (2023).
Gender and Sexuality Research: Work-in-Progress Afternoon
Mar 8, 2023
Description
Marking International Women's Day, this event is jointly hosted by the Centre for Arts, Media and Culture (CAMC) and the Centre for Creative Practice (CCP), with presentations from different disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities and social sciences. We will also be joined by an external collaborator (Dr Manuella Blackburn, Open University), with a short performance.
Catherine Walker Memorial Lecture: Dr Jane Potter
Nov 14, 2022
Description
A lecture held at Craiglockhart in honour of the late Catherine Walker, formerly curator of the War Poets Collection.
Dr Jane Potter (Oxford Brookes University)
Strange Meeting(s): Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart
The site of one of the most famous meetings in literary history, that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Craiglockhart War Hospital is embedded in the cultural memory of the First World War. Crucial both in Owen's recovery from the trauma of his active service and his development as a poet, Craiglockhart also provided him with opportunities for many other significant meetings that were essential to his poetic and emotional maturity. This talk will highlight some of these 'strange meetings' and reflect on the lasting legacy of the place that Owen called 'this free-and-easy Oxford'.
We Moderns: Current Work in Modernist Studies
Mar 10, 2018
Description
Annual symposium of the Scottish Network for Modernist Studies. Including contributions from Scott Lyall (keynote lecture), Tara Thomson and Helena Roots (research papers). Co-organised by the aforementioned and Andrew Frayn.
The German Diaspora during World War I: Remembering Internment Camps in Britain and the Commonwealth
Mar 9, 2018
Description
Invited talk to promote the above project at one-day public event on Cultural History in Practice: Spies and Spying. Public study day, c. 25 attendees from both academia and general public. (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cultural-history-in-practice-spies-and-spying-tickets-42859779755)
The First World War in familiar and forgotten novels of the 1920s.
Feb 8, 2018
Description
Talk at Erewash museum to the Local History Café, drawing on research for Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose, 1914-1930 (2014). Invited public lecture to c. 20 attendees.
The talk I gave on "Attachments and coping towards the end of the First World War: D. H. Lawrence's Bay (1919)" at University College Dublin in April is now available as a podcast at the following link:http://www.ucd.ie/humanities/events/podcasts/2015/wartime-attachments/#frayn
Invited talk in Dublin, to be podcast later
Apr 29, 2016
Description
I gave an invited lecture at the University College Dublin Humanities Institute on 'Attachments and Coping towards the end of the First World War: D. H. Lawrence's Bay (1919)', as part of the Wartime Attachments: Pain, Care, Retreat and Treatment in the First World War lecture series. The lecture will later be available as a podcast.http://www.ucd.ie/humanities/events/ourevents/archive/name,317151,en.html
