Modern Conflict and the Senses

"Modern Conflict and the Senses investigates the sensual worlds created by modern war, focusing on the sensorial responses embodied in and provoked by the materiality of conflict and its aftermath. The volume positions the industrialized nature of twentieth-century war as a unique cultural phenomenon, in possession of a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of human behaviour, from total economic mobilization to the unbearable sadness of individual loss. Adopting a coherent and integrated hybrid approach to the complexities of modern conflict, the book considers issues of memory, identity, and emotion through wartime experiences of tangible sensations and bodily requirements. This comprehensive and interdisciplinary collection draws upon archaeology, anthropology, military and cultural history, art history, cultural geography, and museum and heritage studies in order to revitalize our understandings of the role of the senses in conflict"--Provided by publisher.

Nicholas J Saunders is Professor of Material Culture at Bristol University, Honorary Reader in Material Culture at University College London, and co-director of two long-term First World War projects: the ‘Great Arab Revolt Archaeological Project’ (Jordan), and the ‘Isonzo Valley Conflict Landscapes Project’ (Slovenia/Italy). Between 1998 and 2004, he was British Academy Senior Research Fellow at University College London, making the first anthropological study of First World War material culture. Since 1999 he has published many academic articles and books on the archaeology and anthropology of modern conflict.

Paul Cornish is Senior Curator at the Imperial War Museum, and played a leading role in the museum’s Regeneration Project for the 2014 Centenary. He has co-organised five IWM-based international and multidisciplinary conferences on modern conflict, has published Machine Guns and the Great War (2009), The First World War Galleries (2014), and co-edited with Nicholas Saunders the volumes Contested Objects (2009) and Bodies in Conflict (2014), both published by Routledge.