Lecture Series 2013 to 2016
This new three-year series of public lectures delivered by eminent international scholars in different disciplines, such as history, literary and film studies and memory studies, will explore how war, its traumas and its contested memories have proved pivotal to the formation of European identities in the 20th century.
The series is being organized by the Centre for War Studies (School of Histories and Humanities) and the Centre for European Studies (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies) in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub. It will adopt a different focus each year:
> In 2013-14, the centenary of the First World War, the series will explore the nature and legacy of that conflict down to the present.
> The focus in 2014-15, the seventieth anniversary of 1945, will be on the extreme violence of the Second World War and the ways in which this has shaped subsequent European memories and identities.
> The final year, 2015-16, will re-examine the legacies of the Easter Rising at its centenary and of Ireland’s revolutionary decade more generally. It will seek to locate the founding decade of modern Ireland in the context of Europe and the non-European world over the last hundred years, including inter-war Eastern Europe, post-1945 decolonization and Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles.’
2013-14: The Long Shadow - Trauma, Memory and Identity after the Great War
Printed programme
8 October 2013 | 18:00 | Trinity Long Room Hub
The Vanquished: Europe and the Aftermath of the Great War
Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin)
Europe experienced a difficult transition from war to peace after 1918, and this was particularly the case for the defeated powers of the Great War. Triggered by the collapse of three centuriesold empires - the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires - and the military defeat of Imperial Germany, large parts of Europe descended into chaos. A series of revolutions, civil wars and waves of ethnic cleansing between 1918 and 1923 killed roughly four million people - more than the combined wartime casualties of Britain, France, and the United States.
Standard history accounts of the twentieth century have largely overlooked these brutal conflicts during which the main
political agendas of the twentieth century - class warfare, interethnic conflict, racial hatred - were established. It is, however, impossible to understand the rise of Bolshevism, Nazism or indeed the ongoing conflicts in the Balkans or the Middle East without consideration of Europe's first twentieth century 'postwar.' This lecture will offer a re-evaluation of its role in the shaping of the twentieth century.
BIO: Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of UCD’s Centre for War Studies. He is the author and editor of several books on the history of violence, including, most recently, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s Hangman. The Life of Heydrich (Yale, 2011); (with Donald Bloxham), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (2011); and (with John Horne), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (2012).
12 November 2013 | 18:00 | Trinity Long Room Hub
A Time of Silence? Legacies of the Civil War in Spain after Franco
Michael Richards (University of the West of England)
Spain has had its own variant of the late-twentieth and early twenty first century 'history wars'. This lecture examines the Spanish case in a comparative perspective.
In the first part it outlines the political and social history of Spain in the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the relationship between long, medium and short-term causes of the civil war of the 1930s, critical ways of thinking about Spain's civil war as a singular 'event', and the necessary distinction between post-war Francoism as a regime and society during the Franco years. This re-thinking of the history up to Franco's death (1975) forms the basis of a brief account of the role of war memories and history writing during the transition to democracy. The second part of the lecture describes and analyses the civic movement for 'the recuperation of historical memory' in Spain since the late 1990s and reactions to this. Spain's recent 'history wars' are explained by reference to the peculiarities of the country's past and to the shaping of collective identity within a global culture of human rights.
BIO: Michael Richards is Associate Professor of History at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His book, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936-1945 (Cambridge University Press), won the History Today prize in 1998. In 2005 he co-edited a volume with Chris Ealham exploring the Spanish civil war through the approaches of cultural history (The Splintering of Spain, CUP). His latest book, After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-making Spain since 1936, has recently appeared (CUP, 2013). He is currently undertaking projects on ‘Digital Memories and History Wars in Europe’ and ‘Psychiatry and the Nation in Spain, 1898-45’.
21 January 2014 | 19:00 | Arts Building, Swift Theatre
To Talk Peace in the Parables of War: The League of Nations after World War I
Patricia Clavin (University of Oxford)
Founded in the wake of the First World War, the League of Nations was the world's first inter-governmental organization
dedicated to the promotion of international security and peace. It famously failed on both counts: the promise of
collective security shattered early thanks to President Wilson's mismanagement of the US Congress; and the League
subsequently failed to halt the march to a Second World War.This lecture offers a new history of the League of Nations, and the history of interwar internationalism, that challenges this familiar story. It will demonstrate how the experience of the First World War meant the League embodied an understanding of international security that underscored the importance of raw materials (notably food, coal and oil); financial stability; and the need to promote international development to the prospects of peace. The lecture will draw out the ways in which these insights shaped the global architecture of international relations in the twentieth century, and the continued relevance of the League's history to international relations today.
BIO: Patricia Clavin is Zeitlyn Fellow and Tutor in History at Jesus College, Oxford and Professor of International History in the Faculty of History. She has published widely on the history of international co-operation, the history of the Great Depression and modern European History. Her latest book, Securing the World Economy. The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920-1946 (Oxford, 2013) was published by Oxford University Press and a new edition of her study of The Great Depression in Europe, 1919-1939 (Macmillan, Palgrave) will appear in 2014. She is currently working on a study of international aid to Austria in the wake of the First World War.
25 February 2014 | 18:00 | Trinity Long Room Hub
Ideas of Genocide (1915-1945): Raphael Lemkin and the Extermination of the Ottoman Armenians
Annette Becker (Université de Paris-Ouest)
It was possible to read in an American newspaper in October 1915: "Atrocities in Armenia do not come home (…) like
the destruction of Belgium, or the wrack of Poland or even the desolation of Serbia. The outrages in Turkey, too, while
undoubtedly awful to a degree beyond portrayal, are probably not nearly equal in extent or severity to the things that have been done by the so-called civilized and Christian nations of Europe during the past 15 months."Only after another World War and another genocide, could this order of importance be inverted: in Armenia something extraordinary had taken place during the Great War, more than in Belgium, Serbia or Galicia. Raphael Lemkin was the man who understood this: a genocide, he told us, is different from other massacres: death is not a means to obtain something, but the end in itself, the desire to eradicate a part of mankind, and it is what happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. We shall follow Lemkin from his invention of the concept of genocide (1942) to his lobbying
for the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).
BIO: Annette Becker is Professor of Modern History at Paris Ouest – Nanterre - La Défense and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has written extensively on the two world wars and the extreme violence they nurtured, with an emphasis on military occupations and genocides. She has devoted research to humanitarian politics, trauma and memories, particularly among intellectuals and artists. Her recent publications include: Apollinaire, Une biographie de guerre, Tallandier, 2009; Les Cicatrices Rouges. France et Belgique occupées 1914-1918, Fayard, 2010, and La Guerre à hauteur d’oeil, Armand-Colin, 2014. She is preparing a book on two messengers of the twentieth century catastrophes, Raphael Lemkin and Jan Karski.
27 March 2014 | 18:00 | Arts Building, Synge Theatre
Vocabularies of Memory: World War I and World II as Global Wars
Jay Winter (Yale University)
The languages of martyrdom in the contemporary world relate to three memory regimes. The first is prevalent in Western Europe, where the term martyr is a throwback, a relic of earlier times. The second is apparent in Eastern Europe, where the concept of 'martyrdom' is alive and well. The third memory regime is that operative in the Middle East and Asia, where the concept of 'martyrdom' is positively radioactive.
The claim of this lecture is that the rhetoric of martyrdom is exclusionary, in that one people's martyrs occluded the others. Polish Catholics and Polish Jews are but one instance of this but, more interestingly, the notion of martyrdom within Jewish thinking changed in the Holocaust so that it has faded away in large parts of Jewish life.
BIO: Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University. He is the editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War, published by Cambridge University Press in December 2013. The first volume, entitled 'Combats', was published in French by Fayard in October 2013. Among his recent works are The Global Spread of Fertility Decline (with Michael Teitelbaum), published by Yale University Press, 2013, and (with Antoine Prost) René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is working on a book entitled 'Imagining War in the Twentieth Century and Beyond'.
15 April 2014 | 18:00 | Arts Building, Swift Theatre
The Hobbesian Breakdown: Legacies of Violence in Soviet Russia after the Civil War
William Rosenberg (University of Michigan)
The Russian Revolution took place in a context of extreme violence.
This lecture will explore some of the ways in which its barely describable traumas were narrated into historical and political understanding. It will touch on how the violence of the World War was originally represented in soldiers' correspondence. It will link changes in the forms and representations of violence to growing deprivation, scarcity and loss, and suggest in turn how these and other massive dislocations soon belied non-violent solutions. This, the lecture will argue, was the essence of Russia's revolutionary condition. The lecture will then point to the legacies of an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature that characterized the Revolution for subsequent Soviet development as well as for interpretations of the 1914-21 period in Russia more broadly.
BIO: William G. Rosenberg is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He has served as President of the Association for East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly AAASS) and as Vice President for Research of the American Historical Association. His interests have focused on late imperial and revolutionary Russia, historical theory, and archives. His recent book, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford, 2011), in collaboration with the archivist Francis X. Blouin, was the winner of the Society of American Archivists’ W.G. Leland Award. He has just completed a study of how the “moods” of Russian soldiers were formally represented and assessed during the First World War as part of a larger examination of the effects of scarcity and loss on the trajectories of revolution and the emergence of the Soviet system.
Funding Bodies
