Programme Details

Wednesday 13 July

From 10: Registration, Grand Parade,  Sallis Benney Theatre Lobby

12-1 Lunch, Grand Parade  Restaurant

1.00 – 2.15: Welcome address from Stuart Laing

Keynote one: Sue Grayzel (University of Mississippi):‘“I Did What I Could With My Gas Mask”: Popular Culture, Civilians and the Prospect of Chemical Warfare Before and During the Second World War’: Sallis Benney Theatre. Chaired by Lucy Noakes

2.30 – 4.00: Session One

1.     Gender on the Home Front Chair: Juliette Pattinson  Room M57: Grand Parade ·       Linsey Robb: Fighting in their own ways? Filmic and radio depictions of men in reserved occupations, 1939-1946 ·       Mark Crowley: Women are without doubt equal to men: post office propaganda to recruit women workers in the Second World War ·       Geraldine Roberts Stone: A harmless recreation? Empowerment and subversion in the poetry of the Women’s Land Army

2.     Narrating the War Chair: Penny Summerfield Room G4: Grand Parade ·       Dorothy Sheridan: Anticipating History: Historical Consciousness and the ‘documentary impulse’. ·       Chantel Summerfield: A Landscape of Memory: Written in the Trees ·       Garry Campion: ‘What are your angels now?’ Battle of Britain representation, 1940-2010

3.     Pre-war imaginings  Chair: Martin Evans, Room 101: Pavilion Parade ·       Joel Morley: ‘Dad used to tell me tales’: Second World War participants and oral narratives of the First World War ·       Eleanor O’Keeffe: Mobilisation and Remembrance in the locality circa 1937-1939 ·       Christine Grandy: Extraordinary envoys: popular fiction and diplomacy before World War II

4.     Defining the Nation After the War   Chair: Gill Scott, Room 102: Pavilion Parade ·       Petra Rau: This Strange Enemy People: British Writers on Occupied Germany ·       Georgina Natzio: National narratives after 1945: Signs of recovery from total war in British and German military and civilian literature ·       Camilla Schofield: Enoch Powell and the Second World War

4.00 – 4.30: Tea break, Grand Parade restaurant

4.30 – 6.00: Session Two

1.      Aerial Bombardment Chair: Martin Evans,  Room M57: Grand Parade ·       Richard Overy – ‘To Outbarbarian the Hun’: The Popular Opposition to British Bombing in World War Two ·       Rebecca Searle: The War Artists Advisory Committee and the bombing of Germany ·       Frances Houghton: the missing chapter: post-war memoirs of bomber command aircrew

2.  Mass Observation and the Second World War Chair: Fiona Courage  Room G4 Grand Parade ·     James Hinton: Mass-Observing the People’s War ·     Jen Purcell: The Power of Mass Observation: Understanding the Meaning of Writing Ourselves ·     Penny Summerfield: Mass Observation, Women and the Popular Memory of the Second World War in Britain Since 1945

3.     Filming the War   Chair: Paul Jobling, Room 101 Pavilion Parade ·       Alexis Pogorelskin: Claudine West and the creation of the popular image of Britain in America during World War II ·       Ellen Wright: Betty Grable: An American Icon In Britain, 1939-1945 ·       Kate Vigurs: Celluloid Memorials: Post-war depictions of Women SOE F agents on Film   4.     Museum, Image and Popular Memory of the Second World War Chair: Annabella Pollen  Room 102 Pavilion Parade ·       Rebecca Britt: Curating memories of love and war ·       Bex Lewis: Keep Calm and Carry On: A re-sounding message ·       Ian Kikuchi: Memory and the Moving Image: Factual depictions of the Burma campaign in film and television, 1945-1995

5. Popular and Material Culture in Wartime  Chair: David Clampin  Room 204  Pavilion Parade ·       Lesley Whitworth: From ‘fair shares’ to consumer protection: utility and its afterlife ·       Kate McLoughlin: Vera Lynn and the ‘We’ll meet again’ hypothesis ·       Alison Chand: Continuity and Change: Masculine Identities in the Reserved occupations in Clydeside, 1939-1945

6.15 – 7.15: Keynote Two: Jim Aulich (Manchester Metropolitan University) ‘Stealing the Thunder: the Imagery of the Left on the Home Front’ Sallis Benney Theatre. Chaired by Juliette Pattinson

From 7.15: Wine reception, Grand Parade Restaurant

Thursday 14 July

9.00 – 9.30: Registration & coffee, Grand Parade Restaurant

9.30– 11.00: Parallel Session Three

1.  Gender and Sexuality Chair: Juliette Pattinson  Room M57 Grand Parade ·       Emma Reilly: An officer and a gentleman: sexual culture in the British army 1939-1945 ·       Emma Vickers: Queerness and the People’s War ·       Lauren Auger: The best soldiers of all! Canadian memory frameworks of the Second World War and the figuring of British war brides and British war bride veterans in Canadian memory narratives   2.     Death in Wartime Chair: Claire Langhamer  Room 204 Pavilion Parade ·       Hilda Kean: The Cat and Dog Massacre of 1939 and the challenge of rethinking the ‘People’s war’. ·       Lucy Noakes: ‘Let Memorials Be Useful’: Commemorating the War in 1940s Britain ·       Sebastiano Guintini: Rhetorics of Horror and the Camps

3.    Post-45 British Fiction Chair: Paula Derdiger  Room G4 Grand Parade ·       Anna McFarlane: The gestalt of the worker/soldier:pacifism and technophobia in post-war science fiction ·       Marina Cano-Lopez: Divided Identities: nation, infidelity and the liberation of Jane Austen in post-war Britain ·       Mark Rawlinson: Reviving the Unsaid: what is our culturally-mediated experience of the Second World War all about?

4.     Memorialising War Chair: Graham Dawson, Room 102 Pavilion Parade ·       Corinna Peniston-Bird: The people’s war in testimony and bronze: the tensions of nostalgia ·       Jane Furlong: The Second World War British memorials ·       Vanessa Morell: Dunkirk Spirit and Captain Scott; Using the comparative approach to assess how their memorials act as remedies of decline

11.00 – 11.30: Coffee, Grand Parade Restaurant

11.30– 1.00: Parallel Session Four,

1.      War and Lived Experience Chair: Petra Rau  Room M57 Grand Parade ·       Melissa Kelly Franklin: The Pains of Sleep; M-O Dream Diaries ·       Hazel Croft: Patriotic pride and a large dose of bromide: psychiatrists and the making of the ‘no neurosis myth’ ·       Helen Johnston & Yvonne Jewkes: The English prison during World War Two

2.     Wartime Britain Chair: Bex Lewis  Room 101 Pavilion Parade ·       Robert James: Cinema going in a Port Town: The Impact of the Second World War on the tastes of Portsmouth’s naval and working class cinema audiences ·       Michael McCluskey: Landscapes at War: Spring Offensive (1940) and London Can Take It! (1941) ·       Victoria Carolan: ‘The Newsreel Counterpart of the Henderson White Paper’? For Freedom (Maurice Elvey, 1940)

3      War and Commemoration Chair: Lucy Noakes  Room G4 Grand Parade ·       Sarah Scripps: Allied in commemoration: 50th anniversary of D ·       Janet K. Watson: Total war and total anniversaries: popular culture and World War 2 commemorations ·       Geoff Bird: Tourism, Remembrance and the landscape of war

4      Contemporary Fiction of the Second World War Chair: Graham Dawson Room 102 Pavilion Parade ·       Eva Perez: Good Germans and bad Tommies: The presentation of unlikely enemies in contemporary British fiction of World War II ·       Adele Jones: Darkness and Desire: The Gendered blackout in Sarah Walter’s ‘The Night Watch’. ·       Christine Berberich: Often Hinted at but seldom talked about: British fascism in literature

1.00 – 2.00: Lunch, Grand Parade Restaurant

2.00 – 3.00 Plenary Lecture Three: Gill Plain,  (St Andrews University)  Escaping 1945: Popular Fiction and the End of the War,  Sallis Benney Theatre. Chaired by Petra Rau

3.00 – 4.00: Screen Archive South East presentation, Sallis Benney Theatre

4.0   – 4.30: Tea break, Grand Parade Restaurant

4.30 – 6.00: Parallel Session Five

1.   Performing and representing Gender in Wartime  Chair: Dorothy Sheridan, Room 102 Pavilion Parade ·       Paul Jobling: A walking as well as a warring nation: menswear advertising in Britain during the Second World War ·       Juliette Pattinson: Hussies, freaks and lady soldiers: uniform, subjectivity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry ·       June Rowe: The essential accessory: lipstick consumption in Britain during World War Two

2      Popular Culture, Popular Representation  Chair Jonathan Black, Room G4 Grand Parade ·       David Clampin: Commercial advertising and the ‘people’s war’ in the everyday ·       Rebecca D’Monte: The empty space: British theatre during the Second World War ·       Jacinta Kelly: ‘Slow, quick, quick’: Irish civilian nurses keeping the chin up in Britain during the Second World War 1939- 1945.

3      Myth and alternate histories of War Chair Janet K. Watson  Room M57 Grand Parade ·       Lachlan Grant: Myths and memories of Australia’s Second World War in Asia and the Pacific ·       Bruce Newsome: Against all odds: popular cultural myths of British fighting performance during World War 2 ·       Glyn Morgan: Branching paths: Nazi Victories in alternate second world wars.

4      Representing and Narrating Home and Allies Chair: Gill Scott,  Room 101 Pavilion Parade ·       Simon Topping: Faithful Sentinel: Northern Ireland, America and the Second World War ·       Lee Collins: ‘One of the more imponderable influences in the erosion of conservative attitudes’: The Soviet Union in the eyes of the British people during the Second World War

5      Prisoners Of War Chair: Louise Purbrick,  Room 204 Pavilion Parade ·       Bruce Scates: ‘Memory Traces’: Revisiting the traumascapes of World War II ·       Christina Twomey: POWs and popular culture: The aesthetics of horror ·       Clare Makepeace: Traversing the boundaries of ‘home’ and ‘front’: POWs and their relationships beyond the barbed wire

From 8: Conference Dinner, Al Duomo Restaurant

Friday 15 July 9.00 – 9.30: Registration, coffee, Grand Parade Restaurant

9.30– 11.00: Parallel Session Six

1.     Fashion and Material Culture Chair: Juliette Pattinson  Room 101 Pavilion Parade ·       Jane Hattrick: Hartnell’s War: Issues of fashion and business, popular entertainment, royal dressing and the morale of the British people, 1939-1945 ·       Alison Slater: The history and memory of dress in World War Two ·       Marie McLoughlin: ‘My Heart is inditing of a great matter…’ Lord Woolton, January 1944

2.      Representing War: Posters and Art Chair: Lara Perry Room M57 Grand Parade ·       Elizabeth Waters: Poster images of the enemy: the decline of demonisation ·       Jonathan Black: Extraordinary people in a people’s war: national identity, portraiture and spectatorship in British official war art of the Second World War ·       Elizabeth De Cacqueray: Women artists and the ‘people’s war’: boundary crossings

3.     Memory and Material Culture Chair: Lucy Noakes  Room 102 Pavilion Parade ·       Jonathan Hogg: ‘An Oil Painting from hell: The atomic bomb in British popular culture 1945-1950 ·       Graham Cairns: The Royal Festival Hall: Building the new post war Britain ·       Henry Irving: Economics, politics and the cultural memory of war during the transition from war to peace, 1945-1955

4. Wartime Literature  Chair: Petra Rau, Room M2 Grand Parade ·       Phyllis Lassner: Britain on the Move: World War Two spy fiction and film ·       Katherine Cooper: ‘It was the happiest country in Europe’: The myth of Czechoslovakia in Storm Jameson’s novels of World War II ·       Paula Derdiger: Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘At Mrs Lippingcotes’: The wartime ruins of middle class fiction

11.00 – 11.30: Coffee break, Grand Parade Restaurant

11.30– 1.00: Parallel Session Seven

1.     Internees and Prisoners of War: Italy and Britain  Chair: Lucy Noakes   Room M57 Grand Parade ·       Wendy Ugolini: Untold stories of loss: Mourning the ‘enemy’ in World war II Britain ·       Eugenia Corbino: Allied Escapers and Italian Peasants: a history of help and survival ·       Marco Guidici; Remembering a ‘tolerant nation’ at war: Italian prisoners of war in Wales as a case study

2       Representing the War in Contemporary Film,  Chair: Mark Bhatti, Room M2 Grand Parade ·       Noah Riseman: Rectifying the great Australian silence? Australian indigenous war service in Australia (2009) and Harrys’ War (1999) ·       Nicola Rehling: ‘An impossible task’: Popular Memory, Representation and the Second World War in the screen adaptation of Atonement. ·       Yugin Teo: War, adaptation and forgetting: Atonement(2007) and Never Let Me Go (2010)

3      Wartime Literature  Room  Chair: Gill Plain, G4 Grand Parade ·       Philippa Lyon: ‘This convulsion’: Cultural positioning and the poetry of the Second World War ·       Eluned Summers-Bremner: Ruined Hope and Changed Speech: Continuity and Disruption in T.H. White and Patrick Hamilton ·       Caroline Perret: The cultural politics of children’s drawings in Herbert Read’s art criticism and the visual and textual production of French artist Jean Dubuffet in the early 1940s

1.00 – 2.00: Lunch, Grand Parade restaurant

2.00: Conference Ends

Events and options

Conference Dinner

The conference dinner will be at 8pm on Thursday 14th July at a local Italian restaurant called Al Duomos. The cost of a three course meal, with a glass or two of wine, is £20 and you can chose from a special menu on the night. To book a place please indicate that you wish to attend and pay when completing the on-line registration. To view the menu see here: Conference dinner Pre-conference Events:

We are planning a pre-conference walking tour of Brighton Lanes on Tuesday 12 July at 6pm. ‘Brighton Walks’  http://www.brightonwalks.com/  are adapting their Lanes Tour to include a ‘Brighton and war’ theme. ‘Discover Brighton during the wars. Brighton has played a significant part in both World Wars both as a base for soldiers and as a welcome place for a days respite when on leave. This tour tells you the story of the Indian Soldiers recovering in the Royal Pavilion. Did you know they had to set up 3 separate kitchens to feed them all and the Majarah of Patiala was so grateful that he presented Brighton with a gift that still stands today? Or that the rural areas around Brighton where teeming with land girls doing their bit for the war effort and many a romance started in Brighton. Or that Brighton and Hove were major meeting points for soldiers on leave. Even in a black out the soldiers knew where to go and who to meet….and what about all the soldiers camped up in the caves in the hills around Brighton on lookout for invaders. Why was a famous girls school the home of naval officers and why was a national home for blinded servicemen moved to the Midlands during the war? The answers to these and many more questions will be answered during the “Discover Brighton during the Wars” walk.’ There are limited places available for this at a cost of £6.50 per person. This will be an excellent way for delegates that are coming here from out of town to get to know each other and also to get to know the area. To book a place please indicate that you wish to attend and pay when completing the on-line registration form.

Historian Alistair Thomson is organising a pre-conference book launch at Waterstones Bookshop in North Street, Brighton, on Tuesday, 7 30pm – 9 00pm. Moving Stories. An intimate history of four women across two countries is published by Manchester University Press. See flyer here: Moving Stories book launch  Places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis. To attend this event you will need to book a place when completing the on-line registration form.

Post-Conference events:

We have limited places (only 20) available for a group visit to the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. This events will take place on Friday 15th July from 2:30- 4:30pm. We will leave Grand Parade at 2:00pm and travel together by bus to get there- you will need to cover your bus fare for a one day city saver which at present is £3.70. The Mass Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to the early 1950s) and newer material collected continuously since 1981. To attend this event you will need to book a place when completing the on-line registration form. The 20 places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. See the Mass Observation web-site here: http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm

We have also organised a walking tour of Brighton on the Friday afternoon at 2:30 pm with Bert Williams from Brighton and Hove Black History. Again, there are limited places available for this at a cost of £6.50 per person. You can see the Brighton and Hove Black History Website here: http://www.black-history.org.uk/

Screen Archive South East is a public sector moving image archive serving the South East of England. The archive’s collections of magic lantern slides, film, video, and associated materials capture the many varied aspects of life, work and creativity from the early days of screen history to the present day and serve as a rich and invaluable historical resource. They will be presenting in the Sallis Benney Theatre, Grand Parade, 3:00- 4:00pm on Thursday 14 July. Browse their website here: