Conferences and talks

I'm giving a talk at the 2010 antiTHESIS interdisciplinary symposium, to be held on 9 July at the University of Melbourne's Graduate Centre. The theme of the symposium is 'futures', which immediately grabbed me -- as did last year's, 'fear', but I didn't get my act together in time for that -- so I thought I'd use the opportunity to play with some ideas I touched on in the conclusion to my thesis.

Here's my title and abstract:

Avoiding apocalypse: lessons from Britain before the Blitz

This is an age of anxiety. Our civilisation -- from a global scale down to the local level -- is faced by a bewildering range of possible catastrophes: climate change, nuclear terrorism, economic collapse, pandemics, and even asteroid impacts. How should we respond to these threats to our life as we know it? Are our political and cultural systems even capable of reacting effectively to such huge challenges? History provides some answers: this is by no means the first age of anxiety. One particularly interesting example comes from Britain in the 1930s and the almost universal dread of the next war: of annihilation from the air of cities and civilians, by gas and blast and flame. Many proposals were put forward for the prevention of this apocalypse, ranging from the construction of a British bomber fleet second to none, to a nation-wide system of deep air-raid shelters, to an international air force to maintain peace and punish aggression. The choices, in other words, were to resist, adapt or negotiate. In this paper, I will explore which approaches were attempted -- and which were not -- and why, and attempt to draw conclusions for us today, particularly with respect to the global response to climate change.

This also sheds some light on my previous post: perhaps it's not that I don't care about strategy per se, just military strategy?

Thanks to Jonathan for the tip: the Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 project is holding a workshop at the University of Reading on 13 March 2009, on 'War, Bombing, and Trauma: World War 2 and Comparative Perspectives'. It's free but the registration deadline is 3 March 2009. They are also holding an international conference at the University of Exeter on 10-13 September 2009, which will explore the 'variety of political and cultural responses to bombing carried out against predominantly urban targets in Britain, France, Germany and Italy during the Second World War'. They both sound like entirely too much fun!

I'll be giving a talk entitled “From Darfur to London: P. R. C. Groves and the construction of aerial apocalypse, 1916-1922”, at the Australian Historical Association's Biennial Conference, Locating History, 7-10 July 2008, which is conveniently being held at the University of Melbourne. Here's the abstract:

The idea that cities could be shattered and wars won by aerial bombardment in a so-called 'knock-out blow' was embryonic before the Great War. After the war, such exaggerated theories became an orthodoxy among airpower theorists and, by the 1930s, among the wider British public -- an important factor underlying support for pacifism, appeasement and collective security up to the Munich crisis. But the war itself was crucial to both the formulation and the propagation of the theory of the knock-out blow.

Most responsible for promoting this idea of the knock-out blow to a wider audience was General P. R. C. Groves, a veteran of both aerial and bureaucratic warfare: the British equivalent of Douhet and Mitchell. Convinced that Britain's air defences were being dangerously neglected, he retired from the RAF in 1922 and waged a highly-visible press campaign on the issue. In so doing, Groves relied upon and popularised the theory of the knock-out blow, drawing on his experiences in using airpower against rebellion in Darfur, in trying to win the war in France, and in trying to suppress a German resurgence after 1918 -- and thereby, ironically, complicated the task of dealing with Germany after 1933.

I wrote that a few months ago, and some of it strikes me as a bit strange now, but I doubt that anyone is going to be tracking how rigorously I adhere to my abstract!

I'm currently slated to talk just after lunch on the first day. I've never been before, but it must be Australia's biggest history conference, with twelve parallel streams. One of these is a war and society-type stream, so I should be right -- although the title that's intriguing me the most is from one of the others: Erin Ihde's "Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and 'the Imagination of Disaster'"! I see that fellow bloggers Megan Sheehy and Melissa Bellanta will be giving papers too.

Should be fun.