A CONFERENCE SPONSORED BY THE CENTRE FOR METROPOLITAN HISTORY, WITH SUPPORT FROM THE LEVERHULME TRUST

statue of soldiers

Metropolitan
Catastrophes
Scenarios, Experiences and
Commemorations in the
Era of Total War

 

Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Monday 12 July - Tuesday 13 July 2004

Total war blurred the boundaries between home and front and transformed cities into battlefields. This conference explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises worldwide over a long time-span and provides a forum for the interchange of ideas on the comparative history of metropolises and wars.

Programme

Monday 12 July

9.15 Registration
9.30 Derek Keene and Stefan Goebel (CMH)
Introduction
9.40 Eric Homberger (University of East Anglia)
Dress-rehearsal for catastrophe: New York City, 1863
10.20 Carl Abbott (Portland State University)
Big blowups and quiet catastrophes: imagining the death of American cities

Susan Grayzel (University of Mississippi)
‘A promise of terror to come’: the threat of air power and the destruction of cities in British imagination and experience, 1908-1939
11.30 Coffee
11.50 Keynote: Patrice Higonnet (Harvard University)
Paris under the impact of total war
12.50 Lunch
14.00 Roxanne Panchasi (Simon Fraser University)
The Seine is burning: mapping catastrophe in interwar Paris

Janet Ward (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
On the transformative challenge of urban catastrophe
14.45 Keynote: Jay Winter (Yale University)
Configuring catastrophe: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919
15.45 Keith Grieves (Kingston University)
Experiencing the relational difference of life in metropolitan London and the countryside in two world wars
16.15 Tea
16.45

Peter Stansky (Stanford University)
September 7, 1940: the first day of the London Blitz

Helen Jones (Goldsmith College, London)
Visualising London in total war
17.40 Keynote: Antony Beevor (London)
Stalingrad and Berlin – total warfare in a city?
18.30 Reception, IHR Common Room


Tuesday 13 July

9.15 Maureen Healy (Oregon State University)
Total war and local space: Vienna in the two world wars
10.00 Tim Cole (University of Bristol)
Ghettos and the remaking of urban space: a comparative study of Hungarian cities, 1944
10.40 Coffee
11.10

Bernhard Rieger (International University Bremen)
National Socialism, air war and local memory in Bremen after 1945

Julie Higashi and Lim, Bon (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto)
The spirit of war remains intact: the politics of space in Tokyo and the Yasukuni Shrine

12.20 Lunch
13.30 Keynote: Lisa Yoneyama (University of California, San Diego)
Memories in ruins: politics of remembering and forgetting Hiroshima’s atomic annihilation
14.30 Parallel sessions: Session 1. International Relations Room
Eyal Ginio (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Transmitting the agony of a besieged population: Edirne (Adrianople) in Ottoman propaganda during the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913

Jovana L. Knezevic (Yale University)
News, propaganda, mail and rumors in occupied Belgrade, 1915–1918

Mark R. Hatlie (Tübingen University)
Re-mapping Riga: sudden regime change during war and revolution

Session 2. Wolfson Room
Clara M. Oberle (Princeton University)
Times of transit, spaces of transit: train stations in Berlin, 1945–1949

Daniel Prosterman (New York University)
New York City and the American homefront: local politics, world war, and the spectre of totalitarianism, 1933–1947
15.30 Tea
15.50 Joe L. Nasr and Peter J. Larkham (University of Central England)
From vestiges to mementoes: the treatment of churches and other special buildings after the Second World War

Fiona Henderson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Gazing at ruins: the politics and poetics of bombsite tourism in London and Berlin post-1945
16.50 Stefan Goebel (CMH)
Commemorative cosmopolis: Coventry after 1945

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (West Chester University)
National mythmaking and forgetting: the siege of Leningrad
18.00 Conclusion

 

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