Undergraduate - UnitATS3135 - War, media and memory: From the Crimea to the Cold War

Through seminars, workshops, fieldwork and online activities this unit will examine how conflicts from the Crimean to the Second World War have been reported on, represented, remembered and memorialised. It will examine how the prominence of particular media at specific historical junctures resulted in the collective remembering of differing conflicts through the dominant forms of the day and how these media shaped varying forms of remembrance. It will consider how specific technical innovations, in the press, photography, radio, and the moving picture, shaped the ways in which differing wars were remembered and how these intersected with national/ideological imperatives articulated through censorship and propaganda policies. It will examine, in short, how the remembrance of past wars has been shaped by a combination of technical possibility, political imperative and ideological commitment. In this context, with a specific focus on World War 2 and the physical remains of the conflict within reach of Prato, the unit will consider how material forms of remembrance, museums, monuments, memorials, cemeteries, and the like function as media and how in the process of memorialising the dead such sites articulate political and national ideologies. The unit will unpack, examine and critique the complex inter-relations between media, memory and war, exploring how memories of conflict are as much created or constructed as they are recovered. Students will be invited to move beyond a purely theoretical understanding of these issues by examining the mediation of existing war-related sites of remembrance, creating an alternative guide to such a site, developing a guide to an as yet un- or under-mediated site or curating an exhibition related to a particular event, battle or conflict.