This post was contributed by Kate McLoughlin of the Department of English and Humanities.

On 9 March 2012, I organised the fourth biannual WAR-Net meeting at Birkbeck. The meeting was a showcase of members’ interests. Papers ranged from Virtual Iraq to the comedy of war in eighteenth-century novels and prints. Panels covered Holocaust representation, the First World War, the Second World War, visual representation and gender.

The opening keynote, by Professor Debra Kelly of the University of Westminster, was a fascinating exploration of the Free French presence in Second World War London, a presentation that resonated with many of the French delegates to the conference.

Professor Mary Favret closed proceedings with a keynote on wartime Britain’s Fast and Humiliation, a thought-provoking presentation on an eighteenth-century practice now most closely mirrored by the twenty-first-century apology.

You can download speakers’ abstracts and listen to podcasts of the keynote talks on the WAR-Net webpages.