The Academic World in the Era of the Great War
Trinity Long Room Hub, 14-16 August, 2014.
A conference organised by Dr. Tomás Irish (TCD) and Dr. Marie-Eve Chagnon (Université de Montréal) with the support of the Centre for War Studies, the Trinity Long Room Hub, the TCD Department of History, and the Cultures, Academic Values and Education Research Centre (CAVE), and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Reseach Council (SSHRC).
The Great War could neither have been fought nor won without scientific knowledge. Academic expertise in various fields, from history and law to chemistry and medicine, proved crucial to its prosecution. New links were forged with government that would alter forever the ways in which universities functioned and their relationship with the state. As communities, universities were at the heart of the societal and cultural mobilization for the war (through the activities of their staff, the roles played by students and alumni and the use of university facilities for hospitals, public meetings and war-time education). In some cases they sheltered opposition to the war. Academics and universities also played an important role in defining the meaning of the war and refashioned the very notion of international communities of scholarship in order to take account of the polarization produced by the conflict. In this, they foreshadowed the political engagement of learning that would become a marked feature of the ‘short twentieth century.’ For all these reasons, the war cast a long shadow over attempts to return to some kind of ‘normality’ once the conflict was over.
The Academic World in the Era of the Great War is a major international conference that will address these issues in a comparative, inter-disciplinary, and transnational manner.
Attendance at the conference dinner will cost an additional €30 (places limited).
To register, please email academicworldconference@gmail.com no later than 1 August 2014.
Thursday, 14 August 2014
15.00-16.00: Registration
16.00-16.15 Welcome and Introductory Remarks (Marie-Eve Chagnon and Tomás Irish).
16.15-18.00
I Mobilizing Intellect from East to West
Chair/Respondent: Alan Kramer (TCD)
Andrew Barros, (UQAM) Echoes, Reverberations and Dissonances: The Mobilisation, Remobilisation, and Demobilisation of History from East to West (Germany, France, Britain, and the United States), 1914-1919
Gabriela A. Frei, (Oxford) International Law and the Great War. A Discipline in the Crossfire of Critique.
Sakiko Kaiga, (KCL) A Forlorn Hope of Peace: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, an Intellectual Father of the League of Nations, 1914-1918.
18.00-20.00: Reception and opening address by Dr. Patrick J. Prendergast, Provost, TCD.
Friday 15 August 2014
9.00 – 10.45
II Institutional Experiences in a World at War
Chair/Respondent: Pierre Purseigle (University of Warwick).
Andreas Golob, (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz): Propagandistic Popularization and Pure Scholarship. Graz University professors as lecturers of the university-extension movement and academic teachers.
Alexander Dmitriev, (Moscow Higher School of Economics): National School, Junior Faculty and Academic Self-Assertion: Russian Scholars on Educational Reforms during Great War
Tomás Irish, (Trinity College Dublin): Trinity College Dublin and the Academic World during the First World War.
11.00-12.45
III. Making a better World? The Social Sciences face a global conflict
Chair/Respondent: John Horne (TCD)
Andrew M. Johnston (Carleton University) American Sociologists and international Sociology during the First World War.
Brian M. Foster (Mount Saint Vincent University) The Birth of Non-State International Expert: American Social Science and Preparations for Peace after the Great War.
Christina Theodosiou, (Université Paris-1) The influence of the Great War on Waldemar Deonna’s work
12.45-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.45
IV. Between the Nation-State and the Universe: Natural Science at War
Chair/Respondent: Roy MacLeod (University of Sydney)
Heather Ellis, (Liverpool Hope) British Science in War: Measuring and Reshaping British Manhood, 1914-1919.
Kenneth Bertrams (Université Libre de Bruxelles): Politics of Nature: World War I and the Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry, 1911-1926.
Marie-Eve Chagnon (Université de Montréal), The End of Scientific Internationalism. The Process of Demobilisation of the International Scientific Community (1917-1919).
16.00-17.45
V. Keynote speaker: Martha Hanna (University of Colorado, Boulder): Practical Reason: The Mobilization of McGill University’s Medical Faculty, 1914 – 1918.
20.00 Conference Dinner
Saturday 16 August
9.00-10.45
VI. Identity and Gender Politics of a World at War :
Chair/Respondent: Martha Hanna (University of Colorado)
Norman Ingram (Concordia University): Women’s History, Feminist History, Gendered History? Feminist Pacifism and the Paradoxes of the Great War in France
Philippa Read (University of Leeds): “Without Scruple”: The Enfant de l’ennemi Debate in First World War France.
11.00-12.45
VII. Scholarly Networks in War and Peace:
Chair/Respondent: Gearoid Barry (NUIG)
Charlotte A. Lerg, (Ludwig-Maximilliams-Universität München) Fractions of Academic Identity: The German “Propaganda Professors” on the American Campus and Beyond.
Aoife O’ Gorman (Oxford) Boche Barbarism: The depiction of Germany in the Oxford Pamphlets (1914-15).
Tara Windsor (Wuppertal) Studying (with) the Former Enemy: Anglo-German Academic Exchange after the Great War.
12.45-13.45: Lunch
14.00-15.45
VIII. Cultural Demobilization and the Aftermath of the Great War:
Chair/Respondent: Norman Ingram (Concordia)
Elisabeth Piller (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)“Can Science and the World allow this?” –German Academic Distress, Foreign Aid and International Relations, 1919-24.
Julia Roos (Indiana University) International Debates over Atrocity Propaganda in the Aftermath of the Great War: A Contribution to Cultural Demobilization?
Mona Siegel (California State University) Negotiated Truth: The Franco-German Historians Agreement of 1951 and the Long History of Cultural Demobilization after the First World War.
16.00-17.45
IX. Roundtable Discussion
17.45-18.00
Concluding Remarks.