The burdens of history are particularly heavy for the ways we understand Britain after World War II. For many years, historians shied away from writing the history of post-war Britain and ended their narratives of political, economic and social developments in 1945 (or even 1914). When they did turn to the history of Britain after 1945, their accounts focused on the state, its domestic expansion and decolonization, and the role of party politics in these processes. More recently, the increase of interest on the sixty-five years that have passed since the end of World War II has generated new avenues of inquiry and new sites of debate, expanding the objects of study and the modes of history writing. However, there has still to emerge a defined sense of the era, or any agreement that it makes sense to think of the post-war as a field constituted around shared concerns, let alone how these concerns may relate to work on earlier moments of modern British history.
Our conference at the University of California, Berkeley on April 13–14, 2012, will be an opportunity to share work on post-war Britain, and open up conversation on writing British history after 1945.
We invite empirically-grounded proposals for paper presentations that investigate these concerns and propose others from advanced graduate students and those who have recently finished their PhDs. Confirmed commentators include: Jordanna Bailkin, Becky Conekin, Claire Langhamer, Thomas Metcalf, Guy Ortolano, Gautam Premnath, Jim Tomlinson, and James Vernon.
Please send a (maximum) 300 word abstract and one-page CV to Tehila Sasson and Radhika Natarajan at burdensconference [at] gmail [dot] com by September 23, 2011.
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Our conference at the University of California, Berkeley on April 13–14, 2012, will be an opportunity to share work on post-war Britain, and open up conversation on writing British history after 1945.
We ask:
- What conditions defined the post-war era?
- When did the post-war period end? Do we structure periodizations around economic and political accounts of the emergence of social democracy and its eclipse by an ideology that some have termed neo-liberal? Around imperial and international developments (the end of empire, the emergence of international institutions of governance, European integration, etc). Around the cultural conditions of late or post-modernity?
- In what ways do the histories of the post-war era influence or shape our understandings of contemporary politics?
- How do we balance global, national and local contexts in an increasingly connected world? In what ways do we relate Britain’s particular experience of the late twentieth century to the former Empire, Europe, and the rest of the world?
- How do we understand the expansion of categories of archival material (film, music, digital, material and visual culture, ephemera, and oral history) in the Twentieth century?
- How do we relate to scholars in other disciplines engaged with post-war topics?
- Are there any relevant lessons to be learned or parallels to be drawn from other “post-war” periods in British History?
We invite empirically-grounded proposals for paper presentations that investigate these concerns and propose others from advanced graduate students and those who have recently finished their PhDs. Confirmed commentators include: Jordanna Bailkin, Becky Conekin, Claire Langhamer, Thomas Metcalf, Guy Ortolano, Gautam Premnath, Jim Tomlinson, and James Vernon.
Please send a (maximum) 300 word abstract and one-page CV to Tehila Sasson and Radhika Natarajan at burdensconference [at] gmail [dot] com by September 23, 2011.
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CROWD, CUP TIE - ARSENAL V. LIVERPOOL
Roger Mayne, 1963