Continuum is pleased to announce a major new series of research monographs, War, Culture and Society (Series Editor: Stephen McVeigh)
Call for Volumes
Volume proposals are invited for a new interdisciplinary series of research monographs which address the interrelated issues of war, culture and society and provide parallel and complementary military historical and socio-cultural investigations of 20th and 21st century war and conflict.
The 20th century was a period dominated by war on an unprecedented global scale. Wars were fought for territory and resource, for ideology, on humanitarian grounds and out of simple hatred. In this period war was transformed by seismic technological and industrial advances and consequently its reach and impact extended beyond the immediate reality of the battlefield and those considered legitimate combatants to the wider mass of society. The human experience of such devastating violence and upheaval, how this experience has been absorbed and articulated, how war has shaped the ambition and character of nations as well as group and individual identities are major themes in the series. The evolving nature of war in the 20th century has had many consequences. The distinctions between combatant and non-combatant have become increasingly difficult to maintain. The scale of and capacity for violence and death has escalated to unimaginable levels. Yet, this evolution has also generated a concern with morality and ethics in war, and produced declarations of human rights and legal conventions to frame and describe war, in both its origins and its endings. These issues continue to inform and define our world.
The series provides a complementary approach to the study of war and its impacts. Building on a traditional military-historical foundation, the series employs rigorous multi- and -interdisciplinarity and an international scope. The series emphasizes the connections between military history, political science, moral and ethical debates, and cultural production as interrelated forces that have reflected and shaped human experiences, and the consequent representations and memories of war. The series predominantly analyses the relationships between war and culture as it has manifested in the twentieth century, and onwards into the first decades of the twenty-first. The series has a number of connected aims:
1. To extend the scope of traditional military historical approaches by emphasising the importance of the socio-cultural.
2. To relate political, social, cultural and military history with the analysis of literary, visual and filmic texts and thus establish a truly multi-disciplinary arena for the analysis of war.
3. To analyse issues of identity construction and power relations in war and conflict along axes of history, class, race, gender, religion and generational difference.
4. To provide the space for comparisons of differing national experiences of war to highlight the complexities of regional, national and global histories and to avoid the tendency to a ‘western’ bias.
5. To diminish the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines analysing war and provide a space to fully integrate traditional military historical approaches with modern conceptual and theoretical perspectives.
Expressions of interest or abstracts of 300 words, along with a brief CV or publication list, should be sent to the series editor at s.p.mcveigh(at)swan.ac.uk by 30th June 2012. For informal enquiries, please contact Stephen McVeigh at s.p.mcveigh(at)swan.ac.uk.
Dr Stephen McVeigh
Swansea University
Department of Political and Cultural Studies
014 James Callaghan Building
Swansea
SA2 8PP
UK
Phone: 00 44 1792602897
Email: s.p.mcveigh(at)swan.ac.uk