Remembering World War I: archives, history and empire
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission deadline
More than a century after the armistice, World War I continues to resonate as a defining global event—one that reshaped societies, cultures, and political orders across continents. While often framed as a Western conflict, the war’s reach extended far beyond Europe, involving millions of people from Asia, Africa, and other regions under colonial rule. Its legacies endure in archives, family histories, cultural memory, and the language of empire.
This Collection invites interdisciplinary scholarship that re-examines World War I through diverse lenses, uncovering overlooked narratives and challenging Eurocentric perspectives. We welcome contributions from history, museum and archival studies, cultural studies, literature, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and related fields.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Archives and Memory: Family archives, ephemera, and personal testimonies; philately and material culture; rituals of remembrance and memorialization.
- Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives: The involvement of colonized peoples in the war effort; racialized language and propaganda; imperial networks and their legacies.
- Gender and Representation: Soldier imagery, masculinity and femininity in wartime narratives; gendered rituals of mourning and commemoration.
- Cultural Production: Literature, art, and film as sites of memory and critique; representations of the war in non-Western contexts.
- Museums and Heritage: Curating World War I in global museums; ethics of display and interpretation; contested narratives in public history.
- Language and Power: Discourses of nationalism, race, loyalty, and empire during and after the war; translation and circulation of wartime texts; the role of wartime memories in relation to national identity and nationalism.
- Global Histories: Comparative studies of World War I experiences in Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond; transnational networks and mobility during the conflict.
We particularly encourage work that bridges disciplines, amplifies marginalized voices, and interrogates the global dimensions of World War I.
