'War Machine': A Social and Cultural History of the First World War
The modules I teach reflect my interest in the cultural history of war. One of the modules I often teach for first-year undergraduates is '"War Machine": A Social and Cultural History of the First World War'. This module is closely related to my active research interests. I am particularly interested in the relationship between war, bodies, and masculinity, and I have published an article on the imagined relationships between masculinities and military technologies such as the machine gun in the decades immediately preceding the war. In this article I argue that the peculiar prominence of the bayonet in British tactical thinking on the Western Front can be attributed in large part to longstanding anxieties about embodied military masculinities. The module as a whole explores the global history of the First World War from a social and cultural perspective. Thus, while it deals with classic debates, such as the causes of the war and its social and political legacies, it also seeks to understand the impact of the war on gender identities, spiritual and religious beliefs, and artistic expression.
If you are interested in finding out more about these topics, you might want to check out the following books:
- Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996)
- Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)
- Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
You'll also find some fantastic materials for studying the history of the First World War, including digitised primary sources and insights from historians, on the British Library's website.
Other modules I teach include:
- HIST348: Gender Identities in the People's War: Experiences, Representations and Memories.