Monday, February 22nd, 2016 The History of the Great War: A Transnational Approach

Description

Transnational history is the narrative of the Great War written by transnational historians. This lecture discusses the origins of transnational history in the global expansion of higher education in the period 1960-90, and in the memory boom of the last quarter of the twentieth century. This is the framework within which to set the emergence of a school of history which transcends national boundaries to create a global history of the Great War, and which describes a pathway back to write the national history of the Great War in a more complete and comparative manner.

Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, received his PhD and DLitt degrees from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Pembroke College from 1979 to 2001. He won an Emmy award as co-producer of the BBC/PBS eight-hour television series The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (1996) and is a founder of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, an international museum of the Great War inaugurated in 1992. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, published in 1995; editor of America and the Armenian Genocide (2008); and editor-in-chief of the three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War, published in 2014 in English and French. Next year, Cambridge University Press will publish his book, War and the Arts of Memory: Languages of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century and After. He is Distinguished Permanent Visiting Professor at Monash University and has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Graz, the University of Leuven, and the University of Paris-VIII.