This week we examined the effects and affects of war and commemorative practice, how to remember and how to forget, colonialism, imperialism, and pacifism on an international scale.
Featured content on war this week included a talk on The Rise of Endless Wars given by Prof Samuel Moyn (Harvard University) and hosted by the TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse Network.
We shone a spotlight on the multidisciplinary, Mellon Foundation-funded Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation Seminar Series led by Prof Kate McLoughlin and Dr Niall Munro.
We revisited the author-led Book at Lunchtime conversation featuring Prof Robert Gildea’s work Empires of the Mind which exposes how the fantasy of empire has legitimised colonialist intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Turning to peace, we celebrated local peace campaigner Olive Gibbs as part of the Women in Oxford’s History project.
We explored commemorative practice through the lens of Armistice day celebrations in the Caribbean with the TORCH Race and Resistance Programme. We interrogated the lasting legacy of war for the refugees that escape them with a look back at Lande: The Calais ‘Jungle’ and Beyond, the major temporary exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which ran in 2019 and reassembled material and visual culture that survives from the ‘Jungle’ as it existed at Calais from March 2015 to the demolitions of 2016.
Further content featured discussions of the war-era women weavers, the black freedom struggle, Japanese internment, transatlantic slavery, the invention of the modern police force, and the unspeakability of joy.
