Call for Papers

METROPOLITAN CATASTROPHES
Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations in the Era of Total War

Centre for Metropolitan History
Institute of Historical Research
London
12-13 July 2004
Deadline: 12 January 2004

The Centre for Metropolitan History at the Institute of Historical Research,
London invites younger or established scholars to submit proposals for original
papers to be presented at a two-day conference on the metropolitan dimension of
total war. Total war blurred the boundaries between home and front and
transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of total mobilisation turned
the
social and cultural fabric of urban life upside down. Moreover, large cities
and
city dwellers became legitimate targets of enemy action and suffered
disproportionately from air raids, sieges, genocide, and epidemic diseases in
the wake of war. The social upheavals and physical devastation of total war
cast
a long shadow over the postwar years. Survivors and later generations set out
to
reconstruct urban life and to search for meaning in the midst of the ruins of
their communities.

        The imagery of urban disaster preceded the experience of catastrophes.
The first strand of the conference, Scenarios, discusses the apocalyptic
imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and writers
anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban event - a
commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On a different plane,
civil servants and engineers materialised visions of urban chaos and devised
countermeasures in case of emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a
repertoire of cultural forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience
of war. The second strand deals with metropolitan Experiences, notably
mobilisation, deprivation and destruction in wartime. Possible themes range
from
displays of 'war enthusiasm' at the outbreak of hostilities to house-to-house
fighting concentrated in the ruins of family life. Ruins and the repercussions
of war is the central theme of the third strand, Commemorations, which
investigates postwar efforts to remember and forget. The quest for meaningful
forms of commemoration was hard enough after the First World War; the Second
World War, which saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility
that the limits of representation had been reached.

        Some of the topics which presenters may wish to address include:

-        Anticipation and allegory: images of urban chaos in Expressionist art
-        The business of panic: safety practices in two postwar periods
-        Terrific entertainments: air warfare, the atomic bomb and
science-fiction publishing

-         Ghettoes and the remaking of urban space in Eastern Europe
-        The psychology of siege warfare: Leningrad in the Second World War
-        American metropolises and the political crowd during the Vietnam War
-         Longitudal perspectives: Paris under the impact of wars: the
Franco-Prussian War, the two world wars, the Algerian War
-        Berlin: centre of revolution, the Nazi's 'Germania', city in ruins,
capital of the Cold War

-        National myth-making and forgetting: the London Blitz; the bombing of
Tokyo
-        The fire of Smyrna (Ismir) experienced and remembered
-        Hiroshima: a regional city turned international site of memory
-        Modernism and nostalgia: urban reconstruction in the East and the West

        Ultimately, this conference hopes to provide a forum for the
interchange
of ideas on the comparative history of metropolises and wars. During the last
decade, scholars have shown increasing interest in the social and cultural
history of modern warfare in general and the two world wars in particular. Yet
the comparative history of total war remains largely unwritten; much research
is
limited by national perspectives and conventional periodisation. This
conference
explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises (understood
as cities of international stature, but not necessarily capital cities)
worldwide over a long time-span. While papers which focus on a single city at a
particular point of time are welcome, contributions comparing different
metropolises or contrast the relative impact of different wars on the same city
are especially encouraged.

        The Centre for Metropolitan History is seeking proposals for both
30-minutes papers and shorter contributions of ten minutes. Contributors would
be encouraged to include visual material. We expect to publish a selection of
papers in a volume. Professors Patrice Higonnet (Harvard), Jay Winter (Yale)
and
Antony Beevor (London) will be keynote speakers. The working language of the
conference and the published volume will be English. Please send a 300-word
abstract and a one-page CV to the conference organiser at the following address
by 12 January 2004: Dr Stefan Goebel, Centre for Metropolitan History,
Institute
of Historical Research, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street,
London
WC1E 7HU, e-mail: stefan.goebelsas.ac.uk
<mailto:stefan.goebelsas.ac.uk>,
<http://www.history.ac.uk/cmh/cmh.main.html>. We are seeking hard to make a
contribution towards speakers' expenses.