MKGD Online Research Colloquium
Program in the Summer Term 2026 (PDF)
Monday, April 27, 2026, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM
Prof. Dr LUCY NOAKES (University of Essex)
War and Peace: Mass Observation, Memory and the Ends of the Second World War in Britain
As the Second World War in Europe stuttered to its conclusion in May 1945, the British social survey organisation was busy collecting material on the thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears of its panel of writers. This paper looks at the diaries of the Mass Observation National Panel at the war’s end and examines how memories of wartime were being constructed at this moment of hope, but also of uncertainty. It compares the memories that were appearing in 1945 with the wave of remembering the Second World War that was such a potent backdrop to the Brexit debates in Britain between 2016 and 2020. Through this comparison, the paper hopes to highlight the ways in which memory-making operates in times of collective instability and uncertainty.
LUCY NOAKES is the Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, and current President of the Royal Historical Society. Her recent publications include Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Manchaster UP, 2020) and The People’s Victory: VE Day Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There (Atlantic Books, 2025).
Moderation: Prof. Dr ISABELLE DEFLERS (University of the Bundeswehr Munich)
PDF of the Flyer
Monday, May 11, 2026, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar
Prof. Dr JANE OHLMEYER (Trinity College Dublin)
Women, War and Sexual Violence in Early Modern Ireland
As part of the seventeenth colonial conflagration, known as “Wars of the Three Kingdoms”, incidents of sexual violence—stripping, castration, mutilation, rape, gang rape, and reproductive violations—occurred against women and some men across Ireland. The historical and legal evidence for this violence was recorded in witness statements that form part of an archive, known as the “1641 Depositions”. This talk examines this extraordinary archive, now housed in Trinity College Dublin and published online, especially the witness testimony provided by Protestant women. It explores how sexual violence was reported and then politicised. Though testimony that related sexual violence was rarely used in the court room, Protestant propagandists—from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries—manipulated these accounts to instil fear and justify retribution.
JANE OHLMEYER is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin. In 2023 received an Advanced ERC for VOICES, a project on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland. Her latest book is Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2023). In 2023 she was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities.
Moderation: PD Dr ANNE-LAURE BRIATTE (Sorbonne Université)
PDF of the Flyer
Monday, June 15, 2026, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar
Dr JASPER HEINZEN (University of York)
Book Discussion: Prisoners of War and Military Honour, 1789-1918 (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Customs adapted from experience have always informed the conduct of armies towards each other and towards enemy populations. By the seventeenth century parole had become one such mainstay of the laws of war. The pawning of their personal honour enabled officers to purchase freedom of movement and other privileges when they were taken captive. Increasingly, other ranks and civilians claimed a right to parole, too. Based on material from close to thirty British, Dutch, French, German, and Swiss archives the book investigates how captives, statesmen, and humanitarians understood the heavily gendered term honour in the ‘long nineteenth century’, how they negotiated national differences, and why parole d’honneur continued to matter as a humanitarian resource into the First World War despite recurring infringements.
JASPER HEINZEN is a senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of York. His research focuses on nineteenth century Europe in global perspective, military history (18th – 20th centuries), gender history, prisoners of war/internment, institution of monarchy, and state-building. His recent publications include Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building, 1866-1935 (Cambridge UP, 2017).
Comments: Dr ELODIE DUCHÉ (York St John University) and
Prof. Dr BRIAN FELTMAN (Georgia Southern University)
Moderation: Prof. Dr TANJA BÜHRER (Paris Lodron University Salzburg
PDF of the Flyer
Monday, July 6, 2026, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar
Prof. Dr KAREN HAGEMANN (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Book Discussion (in English): Forgotten Soldiers: Women, the Military and Wars in Europe since 1600
(Vergessene Soldatinnen: Frauen im Militär und in den Kriegen Europas seit 1600, Suhrkamp 2026)
In times of war, women have served in European armed forces for hundreds of years, as camp followers, soldiers’ wives, nurses, military auxiliaries, female soldiers or partisans. Yet their history has been largely forgotten. The book takes a comparative look at the military deployment of women and how it changed between the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War and the end of the Second World War, focusing on Europe and selected colonial and imperial conflicts. It describes the war experiences of these women, how they were perceived at the time, and their place in the collective memory of war. The book argues that wars in history have rarely been fought without female support. It makes visible these women as the „forgotten female soldiers“ of military and war history.
KAREN HAGEMANN is James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Together with Stefan Dudink and Sonya O. Rose, she is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020).
Comment: Prof. Dr em. MICHAEL GEYER (University of Chicago)
Moderation: Prof. Dr. ISABEL HEINEMANN (Ludwig Maximilian University Munich / Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History)
PDF of the Flyer
Program in the Winter Term 2025-26 (PDF)
Monday, October 20, 2025, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar – CANCELLED
Prof. Dr MICHELLE R. MOYD (Michigan State University)
(Post)Colonial Histories of Warfare
as Gender History: Perspectives and Possibilities
Colonial warfare has long occupied a strange position within military historiography. Colonial military historiography and African military historiography, for example, often bypass each other. Viewed first as gender histories, however, colonial and anti-colonial warfare can be examined together, revealing the underlying assumptions that informed how colonizers and colonized decided to go to war, how to fight once war had begun, and how “defeat” or “peace” would be measured. A postcolonial lens renders visible the multidimensional violence of these wars, as well as new infrastructures of violence generated by war and colonialism. This presentation surveys the state of the field, discusses changes in conceptual frameworks, and uses select examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to point towards new possibilities.
MICHELLE R. MOYD is Red Cedar Distinguished Professor of History at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014). Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Radical History Review, Slavery and Abolition, and International Labor and Working Class History.
Comment: Prof. Dr THOMAS KÜHNE (Clark University)
Moderation: Prof. Dr ISABEL HEINEMANN (Ludwig Maximilian University Munich / Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History)
PDF of the Flyer
Monday, November 17, 2025, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar
Prof. Dr JULIETTE PATTINSON (King’s College London)
‘Gloried in her grotesque and spurious manhood’: Constructing the Uniformed Woman of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, 1907–1920
In the early twentieth century, attitudes towards the uniformed woman were complex and shifting. While wearers enjoyed the status that uniform conferred, they were frequently perceived as subverting conventional gender norms. Uniformed women were often criticised in the press for being mannish and relinquishing femininity and yet the socially elite British women of the FANY were widely celebrated. By using the FANY as a case study, the talk examines these various constructions of the uniformed woman, considering both external perceptions as well as self-representations, utilising newspaper articles, letters, memoirs and Corps records.
JULIETTE PATTINSON is Professor of War Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her key publications include: Men in Reserve: British Civilian Masculinities in the Second World War (Manchester UP, 2017); and Women of War: Gender, Modernity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Manchester UP, 2020; and Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War (Manchester UP, 2021).
Moderation: Prof. Dr KAREN HAGEMANN (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
PDF of the Flyer
Monday, DECEMBER 8, 2025, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar
Prof. Dr SUSIE PROTSCHKY (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Race and Soldiering Masculinities in Modern Dutch Colonial Wars in Indonesia
Within the Dutch colonial army in Indonesia (the KNIL, or Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger), ‘Ambonese’ or Moluccan soldiers’ reputations for ferocity carried through from the Aceh War (1873–1942) to the aftermath of the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–1949) in ways that worked to absolve white members of the Dutch national army (Koninklijke Landmacht) from responsibility for the worst violence of the Revolution. In an extension of Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig’s notion of ‘martial Orientalism’, I argue in the presentation that the entire spectrum of the KNIL hierarchy—from the European officers to the lowest convict auxiliaries from Java—must be brought into a critical historical analysis of how ethnic differences were theorised and mobilised for warfare within the KNIL.
SUSIE PROTSCHKY is Professor of Global Political at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is a historian of Dutch colonialism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indonesia, and an expert on politics and visual culture. She is the author of Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Manchester UP, 2019); Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Brill, 2011); and various edited collections on modern history and photography in Indonesia.
Moderation: Prof. Dr TANJA BÜHRER (Paris Lodron University Salzburg
PDF of the Flyer
Monday, February 23, 2026, 4:00–6:00 pm CET (10:00 am–12:00 pm EST), ZOOM Seminar
Prof. Dr. BRIAN SANDBERG (Northern Illinois University)
A Virile Courage: Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion, 1559-1629
The presentation examines the gendered nature of violence and political culture during the French Wars of Religion (1559-1629). The book project it is based on will provide a detailed investigation of the relationships between gender and violence, exploring dimensions of femininity and masculinity that shaped the civil conflicts between Catholic militants, Calvinist activists, royal troops, and other armed forces. The dynamics of the religious wars challenge the common notion that warfare is an exclusively masculine domain, forcing us to rethink gender’s role in the broader history of violence. It will provide an examination of women and gender in the French Wars of Religion, contributing new perspectives on the dynamics of gendered violence, feminine activism, and gender relations in wartime.
BRIAN SANDBERG is a Professor of History at Northern Illinois University whose research focuses on religion, violence, gender, and political culture in the French Wars of Religion (1559-1629). He has published Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins, 2010); and War and Conflict in the Early Modern World, 1500-1700 (Polity Press, 2016). Sandberg is currently a Senior Fellow at the Iméra institute in Marseille.
Moderation: PD Dr ANKE FISCHER-KATTNER (University of the Bundeswehr Munich)
PDF of the Flyer

