The First World War: literature, culture, modernity

Convenors:
Dr Santanu Das, King’s College London
Dr Kate McLoughlin, University of Oxford

A hundred years after the war’s outbreak, this conference brings together some of the world’s leading experts and emerging scholars to reassess its literary and cultural impact and explore its vexed relationship to modernity.  Was the war a ‘crack in the table of history’ or did it reinforce deep continuities?  What is the relationship between artistic form and historical violence, and between combatant and civilian creative responses? What are the colonial and transnational dimensions of First World War literature? Spanning across literature, the visual arts and music, the conference will adopt an international perspective as it investigates the war’s continuing legacies.

Speakers include:

Dr Nadia Atia, Queen Mary, University of London
Professor Fran Brearton, Queen's University, Belfast
Profesor Geert Buelens, University of Utrecht
Professor Sarah Cole, Columbia University
Professor Laura Doan, University of Manchester
Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus, University of Northumbria
Professor Alison Fell, University of Leeds
Professor Margaret Higonnet, University of Connecticut (Storrs)
Professor Mary Jacobus CBE, FBA, University of Cambridge
Professor Tim Kendall, University of Exeter
Professor Dame Hermione Lee FBA, University of Oxford
Professor Edna Longley FBA, Queen’s University, Belfast
Professor Laura Marcus FBA, University of Oxford
Dr Jane Potter, Oxford Brookes University
Professor Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia
Dr Eugene Rogan, University of Oxford
Professor Max Saunders, King’s College London
Professor Vincent Sherry, Washington University in St Louis
Dr Claudia Siebrecht, University of Sussex
Dr Trudi Tate, University of Cambridge
Dr Hope Wolf, University of Cambridge