Academic Year 2016-17

Asia and the Great War

Prof. Guoqi Xu (University of Hong Kong)

Guoqi Xu is Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University and is one of the world’s most prominent scholars in the fields of modern Chinese and international history. Professor Xu was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2008-09 and taught from 1999-2009 at Kalamazoo College (USA) as the Wen Chao Chen Chair of History and East Asian Affairs. In 2012, he was a Visiting Professor at UCD.

His most recent book, published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2016 is Asia and the Great War.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

War and identification – First World War experience and the effects on identity

Dr Steffen Lind Christensen (Aarhus University)

As part of his 2-month visiting fellowship at the UCD Centre for War Studies, PhD fellow Steffen Lind Christensen, Aarhus University (Denmark), is presenting his project: War and identification – First World War experience and the effects on identity.

The project examines processes of collective identification among the Danish minority in the Imperial German army, 1914-18, and focuses on how perceptions of affiliation and community were practised and negotiated within the minority group both during and after the war.

Time: 2:00pm

Venue: School of History, Room K115

Book Launch: Founding Weimar

Professor Sir Richard Evans (Cambridge University) will launch UCD Centre for War Studies Irish Research Council Elevate Fellow Dr Mark Jones’s first book, Founding Weimar Violence and the German Revolution of 1918-19 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Sir Richard John Evans, (opens in a new window)FBA, (opens in a new window)FRSL, (opens in a new window)FRHistS was (opens in a new window)Regius Professor of History at the (opens in a new window)University of Cambridge until 2014, where he is currently President of (opens in a new window)Wolfson College. He is also Provost of (opens in a new window)Gresham College in London. His most recent book, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815 -1914 was published by Penguin in 2016. His many books include seminal studies of 19^th and 20^th century German and European history, as well as works upon counter-factual history, historiography and Holocaust denial. Over the years, his work has won the Wolfson Literary Award for History, the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and the Hamburg Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Birkbeck College, London. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Date: Tuesday 4 April 2017

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Venue: School of History Boardroom (K114)

UCD - Oxford Conference

UCD - Oxford Conference on Transnational Resistance in World War II

Transnational Resistance is an international research network that questions some of the basic assumptions about the history of resistance in Europe, exploring the lives of transnational resisters.

The international network comprises seven partners across Western and Eastern Europe and will be studying the phenomenon of transnational resistance – defined as resisting outside one’s country of origin – how it emerged from economic migration, political and religious exile, flight and deportation; how encounters, exchanges and misunderstandings took place between transnational resisters in camps, prisons and ghettoes, selected resistance networks and key resistance events; and how the afterlives and memories of these resisters evolved in relation to dominant post-war narratives of national liberation, the Cold War and the Holocaust.

Website:(opens in a new window) (opens in a new window)http://transnational-resistance.history.ox.ac.uk/

Three international workshops will take place over the duration of the project. The first of these took place in Belgrade from 31 March to 3 April 2016.

The second, hosted by University College Dublin’s Centre for War Studies, will be in Dublin from 30 March to 2 April 2017 and the final workshop, hosted by the Modern European History Research Centre, will take place in Oxford from 12 to 15 April 2018.

Time: Programme to follow

Venue: The Clinton Institute, UCD

Julia Eichenberg

Capital of Europe. Governments-in-exile and the London Moment, 1940-1945

Dr Julia Eichenberg (Berlin)

Dr Julia Eichenberg is an Assistant Professor at Berlin's Humboldt University. Until September 2011, she was an ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the project ‘The Limits of Demobilization', to which she contributed a comparative study of paramilitary violence in Poland and Ireland after the First World War.

She is currently a “Freigeist Fellow” working on a new project that explores the history of London-based governments in exile during World War II.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge: Roma, Statelessness, and Internment in Late Imperial Austria

Prof. Tara Zahra (University of Chicago)

Tara Zahra is Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many award-winning books, including, most recently, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016). The book explores how debates about and experiences of emigration shaped competing ideals of freedom in Eastern Europe and "the West" over the course of one hundred years.

She is currently working on a co-authored book with Pieter Judson on the Habsburg Empire during the First World War (to be published by Oxford University Press). In 2014, Prof. Zahra was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K115

Fortress Przemy?l, 1914-15. The Dawn of Total War in East-Central Europe

Prof. Alexander Watson (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Professor Watson’s current research focuses on conflict and identity in East-Central Europe. He is interested in all social, cultural and military aspects of ‘total war’, and in the rise of national consciousness, minority integration and pre-Holocaust plans of ethnic cleansing. He has written extensively on these topics, concentrating particularly on the era of the First World War.

Watson’s latest book is the acclaimed (opens in a new window)Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (London and New York: Allen Lane and Basic Books, 2014). The book re-tells the First World War from its instigators’ and losers’ perspectives, and explains how this ‘total war’ bequeathed a fateful legacy of impoverishment, political extremism and racial hatred to East-Central Europe. The book won the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History’s 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the Year. The Sunday Times named it ‘The History Book of the Year’ for 2014.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Living and Dying in International Law: Austria-Hungary in the Legal History of Decolonisation

Dr Natasha Wheatley (University of Sydney)

Natasha Wheatley (Sydney) is a historian of Central European and international history and an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2015, and is currently at work on a book project entitled The Temporal Life of States: Sovereignty, Legal Knowledge, and the Archive of Empire in Central Europe.

Her article, ‘Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations’ appeared in Past and Present in May 2015, and a volume co-edited with Dan Edelstein and Stefanos Geroulanos, Power and Time, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Stalin's Peacemakers: The Struggle for Peace and the Transformation of Soviet identity after World War II

Prof. Geoffrey Roberts (University College Cork)

Prof. Geoffrey Roberts is a recognised world authority on Stalin, the Second World War, and the history of Soviet military and foreign policy. He has published 27 books and some 60 journal articles and book chapters. His work has been translated into 16 languages.

In 2013 by the US-based Society for Military History honoured his biography Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (Random House 2012) with its Distinguished Book Award and he was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in March 2016.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114

Matteo Millan

 "We are ready to defend our lives and freedom". Political violence, armed associations and the crisis of the State in Spain, Italy and France before the Great War.

Dr Matteo Millan (University of Padova)

Dr Millan is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Padova (Italy). Before coming to Padova, he obtained postdoctoral fellowships to carry out research in Oxford and Dublin. He has studied the Intelligence network of the Italian Resistance movement and the fascist squadrismo (‘The institutionalisation of squadrismo’, Contemporary European History, 2013; Squadrismo e squadristi nella dittatura fascista, Rome 2014). More recently, he has engaged in a broad research project on forms of political violence and various armed associations in Europe in the twenty years leading to the First World War and in 2015 he was awarded a major grant from the European Research Council for the project ‘The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War’.

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: School of History, Room K114