Module Directory

What is at stake when we study war, culture and society? This module equips students with different disciplinary perspectives on the human experience of war in different times and places.

This module introduces students to major historical debates on the social effects of war in the modern era, human rights in conflict zones, and the psychological causes and consequences of war experience.

The aim of this module is:

• To enable students to critically assess and engage with a range of disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of war, culture and society at an advanced level.

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Demonstrate familiarity with the main features of different disciplinary approaches to the study of war, culture and society.

Alongside approaches to these debates, students will consider diverse ways of 'framing' the study of war – whether this means thinking through gender, looking at the local or the global, or considering how individuals and societies come to terms with death rather than focusing on fighting.

Finally, the module introduces students to a range of primary sources for studying war and its effects on culture and society, including personal testimony, legal sources, medical texts, and film. The module therefore exposes students to theoretical and methodological perspectives that will inform their study across this MA programme.

General Reading List

• Bourke, J. Dismembering the Male. Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1999).


• Damousi, J. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999).


• Evans, M & K. Lunn (eds.) War and Memory in the 20th Century (1997).


• Gregory, A., The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919-1946 (1994).


• Loughran, T. Shell Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain (2017).


• McLoughlin, K (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009).


• Moyn, S. Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018).


• Noakes, L. & J. Pattinson (eds.), British Cultural memory and the Second World War (2013).


• Roper, M. The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (2009).


• Sondhaus, L. World War One: The Global Revolution (2011).


• Summerfield, P. Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the First World War (1998).


• Thomson, A. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (1994; 2013).


• Winter, J. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (1995).


• War and Remembrance in the 20th Century (1999).


• Winter, J. & J.L. Robert (eds.) Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-19. Volume Two: A Cultural History (2007).

This module will be delivered via:

• One 2-hour seminar per week.