Europe’s Violent Memories Revisited in Series of Public Lectures

Posted on: 15 October 2013

A three-year series of public lectures at Trinity College Dublin will explore how war, its traumas and its contested memories have proved pivotal to the formation of European identities in the 20th century.

The lecture series, Europe’s Violent Memories, will provide an understanding of the central place of war and violence in Irish and European identities during the past century and of the layers of memory, silence and commemoration by which these traumatic episodes have been addressed. It also presents a significant move away from the western focused view of the violent legacy of the Great War including perspectives on Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe.

The first lecture, The Vanquished: Europe and the Aftermath of the Great War, took place on 8th October with a re-evaluation of Europe’s first twentieth century ‘postwar’ by author and scholar Robert Gerwarth, Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of UCD’s Centre for War Studies.

The second lecture A Time of Silence? Legacies of the Civil War in Spain after Franco, will be given by Michael Richards (University of the West of England) on Tuesday, November 12th, 2013 at 6pm in Trinity Long Room Hub.

Speaking about the programme of lectures Professor John Horne, Centre for War Studies, School of Histories and Humanities said: “Trinity and Dublin are privileged to be hosting some of the leading international scholars of war and violence in the 20th century. The Trinity Long Room Hub lecture series will foster a deeper understanding of how our collective identities in Europe have been shaped by these terrible episodes but also of how Europeans have sought to overcome this legacy.”

Featuring eminent international scholars in disciplines such as history, literary and film studies and memory studies, War, Trauma and Identity in the 20th Century has been organised by Trinity College Dublin’s Centre for War Studies and Centre for European Studies in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

In 2013-14, the centenary of the First World War, the series will explore the nature and legacy of that conflict down to the present. The focus in 2014-15, the seventieth anniversary of 1945, will be on the extreme violence of the Second World War and the ways in which this has shaped subsequent European memories and identities.

The final year, 2015-16, will re-examine the legacies of the Easter Rising at its centenary and of Ireland’s revolutionary decade more generally. It will seek to locate the founding decade of modern Ireland in the context of Europe and the non-European world over the last hundred years, including inter-war Eastern Europe, post-1945 decolonization and Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’.

Speaking about the key issues to be examined in the lectures, Professor Balázs Apor, Centre for European Studies, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, said: “The lecture series will address the most uncomfortable questions in the history of Europe in the 20th century by focusing on the relationship between violence, trauma, national identity and the idea of Europe. It seeks to highlight the interconnectedness of memory politics and identity formation in relation to the most shameful events of the last century.”

Commenting on the importance of the lectures for our understanding of Europe, Professor Juergen Barkhoff, Director, Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, said: “The series examines the contested memories of World War One and their ongoing relevance for our understanding of Europe in the 20th centuries and to this very day. With this it makes a central contribution to the Institute’s research theme on Identities in Transformation.”

Media Contact:

Fiona Tyrrell, Press Officer for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin at tyrrellf@tcd.ie or tel: + 353 1 8964337.