A conference organised by Dr. Tomás Irish (TCD) and Dr. Marie-Eve Chagnon (Université de Montréal) with the support of the Centre for War Studies, the Trinity Long Room Hub, the TCD Department of History, and the Cultures, Academic Values and Education Research Centre (CAVE), and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
The Great War could neither have been fought nor won without scientific knowledge. Academic expertise in various fields, from history and law to chemistry and medicine, proved crucial to its prosecution. New links were forged with government that would alter forever the ways in which universities functioned and their relationship with the state. As communities, universities were at the heart of the societal and cultural mobilization for the war (through the activities of their staff, the roles played by students and alumni and the use of university facilities for hospitals, public meetings and war-time education). In some cases they sheltered opposition to the war. Academics and universities also played an important role in defining the meaning of the war and refashioned the very notion of international communities of scholarship in order to take account of the polarization produced by the conflict. In this, they foreshadowed the political engagement of learning that would become a marked feature of the ‘short twentieth century.’ For all these reasons, the war cast a long shadow over attempts to return to some kind of ‘normality’ once the conflict was over.
'The Academic World in the Era of Great War' is a major international conference that will address these issues in a comparative, inter-disciplinary, and transnational manner.
Panels and Programme available here.