The Violence of War: Experiences and Images of Conflict

19-20 June
Considering war, as John Keegan has put it, first and foremost as 'a cultural act', this international two-day conference calls attention to the ways in which warfare violence was imagined and understood during the modern era.

Although historians dealing with war will inevitably be called to concentrate their attention on violence, often the understanding of how violence itself was perceived, understood, imagined and experienced by combatants and civilians is neglected. Much still needs to be said about how war was shaped by and, in turn, influenced, modern perceptions of violence.

Considering war, as John Keegan has put it, first and foremost as 'a cultural act', this international two-day conference calls attention to the ways in which warfare violence was imagined and understood during the modern era, focusing on the distance between expectations and experiences of war; on the distance between - or coincidence of - 'imagined' and the 'real' wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Programme Summary:

Panel Sessions, Thursday 19 June

• Theories of War and Violence
• Violence and the Concentration Camp
• The Atrocities of the First World War Reconsidered
• Acts of Violence in the Second World War
• War in the Nineteenth Century
• War Scares
• Narratives of Contemporary Violence
• Revolutionary and Nationalist Violence
• Civil War
• Defeat, Truce and Forms of Violence
• Imagining the Second World War
• Fascism and War

Speakers:
Dzemal Sokolovic, Vittorio Cotesta, Tristana Dini and Adriano Vinale, Klejda Mulaj; Soledad Fox, Elizabeth Bryant, Doriane Gomet; Stefan Papaioannou, Philippa Read, Andrea Rosengarten, Lampros Psomas, Jacques Schuhmacher, Bastiaan Willems, Kerstin Bischl, Takuma Melber, Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill, Greg Carleton, Pat Troester, Effie KarageorgosAlexandru Jipa-Teodoros, Olivier Cosson, Gretchen Elizabeth Smith, Yael Teff-Seker, Ron Ben-Tovim, Angham Abdullah, Nitzan Tal, Julia Nicholls, James Yeoman, Aidan Beatty, María Gómez-Martín, Claudio Hernández Burgos, Vlasis Komninos, Holly Furneaux, Nicholas White, Chiara Magnante, Jane McArthur, Effie Yiannopoulou, Angeliki Tseti, Lucio Valent, Marla Stone, Matteo di Figlia

Panel Sessions, Friday 20 June

• The Meanings of the Second World War
• Representing and Remembering Twentieth-Century Conflicts
• Psychology and War
• Post-War Order
• Aesthetics, the Media and the Representation of War
• The American Civil War

Speakers:
Benedikt Brunner, Caroline Perret, Vojin Majstorović, Švardová Petra, Judith Keene, Maria Grazia Galantino, Andrea Brazzoduro, Kalina Yourdanova, Duncan Barron and Steve DaviesBidisha Kantha, Pablo La Porte, Daphne Rozenblatt, Béla Bodó, Emily R. Gioielli, Rudolf Kučera, Stuart Bender, Dario Vidojković, Erica Grossi, Efrat Even-tzur, John H. Matsui, David Graham, John Haymond,

Plenary Session
Alan Kramer: The Sharp End: Witnessing, Perpetrating, and Suffering Violence

Full programme and registration

• Download the final programme
• Please note that admission to this event is free without a ticket. Please email Dr. Matthew D'Auria to register.

With support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).