Description

Our dynamic guest scholars will lead sessions in their areas of expertise to help us learn better how to understand and convey the experience of ordinary peoples, many of them illiterate, newly literate, and marginally literate. Analysis of auditory and visual culture is key to reconstructing the ways these populations understood their rapidly changing worlds, including soldiers’ songs, popular music and dance, photographs, posters, advertising, material objects, film, and trench art. Doctors’ and nurses’ reports, along with survivors' reports, evoke the suffering and recovery of body and mind on the battlefront and on the home front. During the Institute, participants will pull meaning from these sources with several combinations of sources and pedagogies.

We will meet at the University of Cincinnati and as guests of cultural institutions throughout the city, where you will be oriented to a wide variety of research resources on the Great War. There will also be a full program of evening and weekend events, some compulsory and some voluntary. We will usually convene as a group in two work sessions every weekday. We will also meet in working groups that combine regional and disciplinary interests to workshop individual projects and come up with group statements on pedagogy and research directions. The faculty director will conduct regular briefings to review our progress to date and to discuss individual ideas and needs. See Schedule (link below) for more details.

Participants should arrange to arrive in Cincinnati by early afternoon on Sunday, 22 June in time to settle in and prepare for our first evening event, an opening reception and orientation to campus and the institute.

Welcome Letter
Schedule
Readings and Viewings
How to Apply