Award for department of history

The Department of History is celebrating another major achievement, with the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) awarding £160,000 to Dr Mark Cornwall.

Mark will use the award for his study into ‘Memorialisation and Regeneration: The Male Wartime Generation in the Successor States 1918-1930’. The project is a comparative study of the ways in which men who fought in the First World War across Eastern Europe tried to cope with its aftermath in the peacetime states which succeeded the Habsburg Empire.

Mark explains, "While historians have assessed how war veterans in Britain and western Europe coped with the traumas of the Great War, the same has not yet been attempted for Eastern Europe. Yet it was there that one of the major disruptions of the twentieth century occurred, with the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the creation of new nationalist states on its ruins. We are still living with the consequences. The focus of my project is on how veterans coped with the mental traumas and the transition to peacetime. Through four case studies on Austria, Croatia, Transylvania and the Bohemian Lands, I will be analysing the diversity of war-memory across the region.

This means how the war was commemorated in monuments and literature, how society coped with the sacrifice, and how some individuals turned to new political movements for ‘regeneration’. The whole project will tell us much about the impact of war and empire-collapse. It is also a study of post-war masculinity and will help explain the process which led many in East-central Europe towards fascism by the 1930s".

It is a major coup for the Department of History to gain this award. Not only will it bring more postgraduates to a Department which has already seen its postgraduate numbers double to 40 over four years, it also helps solidify the new Ethnic Borderlands Centre in the Department. The Centre seeks to promote interdisciplinary research on all aspects of ethnicity and identity in border regions. Launched this year by Mark and his colleagues John Regan (on Ireland) and Matthew Ward (on early America), the Centre has been hosting a series of seminars and Mark’s project will now be attached to it.