Time: Friday, 28 January 2022 at 1:00pm - 2:00pm (UTC+2)
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Meeting ID: 671 8534 1014
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The Canon in the Camp: modes of thinking about past and future in World War II internment camps on the Isle of Man
In the Second World War, all belligerent states as well as some neutral powers interned large numbers of civilians, who were declared to pose a threat to their national interests. Focusing on the cultural history of internment of enemy aliens in Britain, in this paper I want to examine the narratives of the European past which emerged from camp newspapers produced by the internees, most of whom were of Jewish and German background. As I will argue, the turn to the past can be broken down into three modes, which I will analyse through the concepts of history, irony, and policy.
Dina Gusejnova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. She is the author of European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which puts the Europeanist thought of German-speaking celebrity intellectuals Coudenhove-Kalergi in the broader social and intellectual of Europe’s fading empires. She is also the editor of Cosmopolitanism in Conflict. Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War (Palgrave, 2018). Dina's current research concentrates on the circulation of ideas of citizenship and nationality between Britain and the Continent during the Second World War.