In August 2023, Professor Wendy Ugolini, co-founder of the Second World War Network (Scotland), was awarded a large Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant for the three-year project, ‘Beyond Borders: The Second World War, National Identities and Empire in the UK’. Professor Ugolini acts as Principal Investigator for the project with Professor Martin Johnes of Swansea University and Nadine Wright of the Imperial War Museum as Co-Investigators.

The project is the first comparative study to integrate England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and their wartime relationships to Britishness and the British Empire into a single frame. It seeks to recover how the peoples of the UK conceptualised their national identity in wartime, whether as imperial, multinational or singular, and the extent to which this shifted as they moved across the Empire at war. Adopting a four-nation approach, it examines military and civilian migration within the UK, then moves in concentric circles outwards to address imperial encounters, amongst service personnel and civilian workforces, in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. It then traces the return flow of peoples, incorporating the post-war migratory movement of colonial and Commonwealth veterans into the UK.  A major part of the project is to examine how this latter group memorialised their war and claimed sites of memory in the UK and how the war has been remembered within the four constituent nations of the UK, particularly following and in relation to political devolution and campaigns for national sovereignty and independence.

The project will create a UK directory of Second World War oral history datasets across the UK relating to the Second World War and, in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum, will produce new resources for schools addressing the Second World War histories of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the British Empire.

More information is available at UKRI: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY002636%2F1

Image courtesy of Imperial War Museum: IWM SE 109 ‘The British Army in Burma 1944’.

AHRC grant for Second World War Project / Second World War Network (Scotland) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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