2012 Humanities Conference
Women’s Organizations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of the First World War: Moving Across Borders.
Memorial Day Weekend: Saturday, May 26 – Monday, May 28, 2012
An interdisciplinary, international conference co-sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), United Kingdom; the Hamline University Endowed Chair in the Humanities; the Hamline University College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office and Departments of English and Women’s Studies.
The Hamline conference:
Recent developments in the social and cultural history of modern warfare have done much to shed new light on the experience of the First World War, and in particular how that experience was communicated in popular and high culture, and in acts of remembrance and commemoration after 1918. The post-war period (ca 1918-1923) is distinctive, both within individual nations and as a point of international comparison. It is characterized by the often troubled transition from a wartime to a peacetime society, continued conflicts over the repatriation of refugees and POWs; revolutionary and counter- revolutionary violence in parts of central Europe; and new ethnic and national conflicts arising from the collapse of the former Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and the cultural anxieties that surrounded these events. Within this context, the role of organized women's movements and female activists in the post-war period takes on a new importance.
The aim of this conference is to explore major comparative themes such as citizenship, suffrage, nationalism, and women's desire to respond to extremes of need in the post-war era (dislocation, internment, violence and hunger) from a national, international and transnational perspective. It will examine the work of organizations and individuals able to move across international borders, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) or the journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan, who reported on social conditions throughout post-war Europe. The role of such women and organizations in bringing about reconciliation and facilitating cooperation between former enemy nations (cultural demobilization, ‘the dismantlement of the mindsets and values of wartime’—John Horne) will also be examined, as will the role of nationalist women's organizations in perpetuating discourses of war and in facilitating the rise of new forms of ethno-nationalism and racial intolerance (‘cultural remobilisation’) during the period 1918-1923.
Other conferences in this series:
This conference is the third in a series, and the first to be held in North America. The first conference, The Gentler Sex: Responses of the Women’s Movement to the First World War, 1914-1919, London, held in 2005, was followed in 2008 with Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists 1918-1923, Leeds.
Publications arising from the earlier conferences include special issues of Minerva: Journal of Women and War and two edited volumes: Fell, A.S. and Sharp, I.E. (eds) (2007) The Women's Movement in Wartime, International Perspectives 1914-1919 (Palgrave Macmillan); and Sharp, I.E and Stibbe, M (eds) (2011) Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Brill). Two special issues of a peer-reviewed journal and a volume of comparative essays are planned for 2014.
The Hamline Conference builds on this work and is supported by a network grant from the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It will be followed by a fourth international conference in Budapest, Hungary with an emphasis on Eastern and Central Europe.
Conference speakers:
Keynote speaker:
Dr. Susan R. Grayzel, Professor of History and Interim Director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, University of Missisippi. Author of Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), which won the British Council Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies in 2000, and Women and the First World War (Longman, 2002), a global history. She has two forthcoming books: At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge) and The First World War: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford St. Martins).
Other speakers include:
Dr. Erika Kuhlman, Director Women’s Studies Program, Idaho State University, and author of Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War, (New York University Press, forthcoming 2012); Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War. Women, Gender and Postwar Reconciliation, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate over War, 1895-1919, (Greenwood Press, 1997); and co-editor (with Kimberly Jensen) of Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective, (Dordrecht, Republic of Letters, 2010).
Dr. Kimberly Jensen, History and Gender Studies Program, Western Oregon, Co-editor (with Erika Kuhlman) of Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective, (Dordrecht, Republic of Letters, 2010); and author of Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War, (University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Professor Matthew Stibbe, author of Germany 1914-33: Politics, Society and Culture, (Longman, 2010); British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914-1918, (Manchester University Press); and Co-editor (with Ingrid Sharp) Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923, (Brill, 2011).
Dr. Judit Acsády, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest; Professor Gabriella Hauch, University of Linz, Austria; Ms. Ingrid Sharp, Leeds, UK; Professor Olga Shnyrova, Ivanonvo State University, Russia; Dr. David Hudson, Hamline University, US; Dr. Nikolai Vukov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia; and others.
For more information:
Europe:
Ms. Ingrid Sharp, i.e.sharp@leeds.ac.uk
Americas:
Dr. David Hudson, dhudson@hamline.edu