This symposium brings together scholars from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University to discuss methodological approaches to written sources on the First World War. Recent work has increasingly examined what has been silenced as much as what has been said. The experience of violence during the conflict made many soldiers, nurses and civilians unable to communicate what they had been through. Self-censorship and official censorship furthermore created acceptable discourses on the war, silencing many aspects of life at on both fronts. How can historians and literary scholars transform these silences themselves into fruitful research? How can multi-disciplinary lenses deepen current understandings of experiences that occurred between 1914 and 1918? This event has been organised by the Globalising and Localising the Great War network, based in Oxford University’s History Faculty, in conjunction with Oxford Brookes.
