Events

The Centre holds an Annual Lecture that is open to the public. Members of the Centre are convenors of the fortnightly War, Society and Culture Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London. The Centre also supports the Gateways to the First World War events.

Annual Lecture

• 2025/26: Professor Beth Bailey (University of Kansas), ‘The War within the War: The US Army and the “Problem of Race” in the Vietnam Era’ (in collaboration with the International History Review) 
• 2024/25: Professor Gaynor Johnson (University of Kent), ‘European International History in the 1920s: A Centenary Perspective’ (in collaboration with the International History Review) 
• 2022/23: Professors Vivek Chibber (New York University) and Richard Overy (University of Exeter): ‘Imperialism: Past and Present’ (together with the Centre for the Global Study of Empire) 
• 2021/22: Professor Alan Allport (Syracuse University), ‘Battles of Britain: Then and Now’ 
• 2020/21 – Professor Maartje Abbenhuis (University of Auckland), ‘Avoiding War: Neutrals as Agents in the History of War and Peace’
• 2019/20 – Professor Lucy Noakes (University of Essex), ‘Brief Encounters: Grieving and Remembering the Dead in Postwar Britain‘
• 2018/19 – Professor Kerry Brown (King’s College, London), ‘The Communist Party of China and the Moral Narratives of Chinese History’
• 2017/18 – Dr James Matthews (University College Dublin), ‘Guardians of Orthodoxy: Political Commissars in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’
• 2016/17 – Professor Peter Jackson (University of Glasgow), ‘The Weight of the Past and Franco-British Relations in the Twentieth Century’
• 2015/16 – Professor Martina Kessel (Bielefeld University), ‘Performing Power: “Humour” in Nazi Germany’
• 2014/15 – Professor Munro Price (University of Bradford), ‘Napoleon and the Hundred Days’
• 2012/13 – Professor Jim McAdam (Queen’s University, Belfast), ‘The Impact of the Shackleton Report on the Development of the Falkland Islands’
• 2013/14 – Professor Jo Fox (Durham University), ‘Rumour in Britain and Europe during the Second World War’
• 2011/12 – Professor John Stevenson (LSE), ‘Germany’s 1918 Defeat Reconsidered’
• 2010-11 – Professor John Gooch (University of Leeds), ‘Understanding War’

Conferences

• 2021 – Propaganda and Neutrality: Alternative Battlegrounds and Active Deflection
• 2019 – Spaces of War: Spatial Perspectives of Modern War and Conflict
• 2018 – Nineteenth-Century Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency. The proceedings of the conference were published by Routledge in 2020 (Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Nineteenth Century: A Global History, ed. Mark Lawrence).
• 2017 – Occupations in the Age of Total War: Micro-Perspectives and Transnational Research
• 2017 – Body and Soil: Corporeality and Territoriality in Great War Europe
• 2016 – China’s Propaganda System: Legacies and Enduring Themes
• 2015 – From War to Postwar: Reflections on the End of the Second World War
• 2014 – Propaganda and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. The publication of the conference proceedings is in preparation.
• 2012 – The Falklands Conflict 30 Years On
• 2011 – Guns and Identity. The proceedings of the conference were published by Ashgate in 2013 (A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire, ed. Karen Jones, Giacomo Macola and David Welch)
• 2008 – Justifying War. The proceedings of the conference were published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012 (Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age, ed. David Welch and Jo Fox)
• 2006 – The Somme: 90 Years On
• 2001 – War and the Media. The proceedings of the conference were published by I.B.Tauris in 2005 (War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900-2003, ed. Mark Connelly and David Welch)