Research

The Centre builds on the University's reputation for high quality research in military and naval history, area studies and politics. Based in the Department of History, the Centre brings together a number of internationally renowned academics working on a broad range of issues, linked by their common interest in war as an agent of social, political and cultural change. Research conducted within the Centre thus has powerful contemporary relevance.

Workshops

The Centre's workshops are designed to provide an opportunity for invited scholars to engage in active discussion about current research interests.

More about the Centre's workshop series

More information about the Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 research project workshops

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Martin Thomas

Listen to a podcast of the inaugural lecture give by Professor Martin Thomas on 19 March 2009 'The Unloved Quatrième : Locating Empire Violence in the Failure of France's Post-War Republic'.

New Publications

Centre Director Professor Richard Overy has recently published ‘The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars ', Allen Lane, May 2009.

British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity. The combination of a liberal, uncensored society and a large educated audience for new ideas made Britain a laboratory for novel ways to understand the world. The Morbid Age opens a window onto this creative but anxious era, the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was facing a possibly terminal crisis of civilization.

The modern era promised progress of a kind, but it was overshadowed by a growing fear of decay and death, an end to the civilized world and the arrival of a new Dark Age - even though the country had suffered no occupation, no civil war and none of the bitter ideological rivalries of inter-war Europe, and had an economy that survived better than most. The Morbid Age explores how this strange paradox came about. Ultimately, Overy shows, the coming of war was almost welcomed as a way to resolve the contradictions and anxieties of this period, a war in which it was believed civilization would be either saved or utterly destroyed.

This entertaining, thought-provoking and original book is a lesson in the power of ideas and language to shape popular fears in a rapidly changing world, as pertinent today as it was in the years between the wars.

More staff publications.