Melbourne 2018

Call for Papers

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.

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.

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 be expected to submit a 3000-word paper prior to the conference and deliver a twenty-minute presentation at the conference, to be followed by discussion. Proposals should be approximately 300 words in length. Applications should also be accompanied by a short biographical note. Panel proposals are welcome..

Held in Melbourne, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne CBD, 9-11 July 2018.