Total War: An Emotional History

Love, grief, hate and fear are among the emotions most immediately associated with the rhetoric, experience and memory of war. Focusing on Europe during and after the two world wars, this volume explores the emotional worlds of those who lived their lives under war’s shadow.

Lucy Noakes, Rab Butler Professor in Modern History, University of Essex, Claire Langhamer, Professor of Modern British History, University of Sussex, Claudia Siebrecht, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sussex

Claire Langhamer is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Sussex. She works on feelings, ordinariness and everyday life and makes particular use of the Mass Observation Archive, of which she is a Trustee. Her publications include articles on home, happiness, adultery, children’s writing and women’s work and the books Women’s Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000) and The English in Love: the intimate story of an emotional revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). She is currently writing a history of Feelings at Work in Modern Britain.

Lucy Noakes is a social and cultural historian working at the University of Essex, where she holds the Rab Butler Chair in Modern History. Her work focuses on the two total wars of the twentieth century, and explores issues of gender, memory, selfhood and memory. Publications include War and theBritish (1998), War and the Gentle Sex (2006), and British Cultural Memory and the Second World War, edited with Juliette Pattinson. She is currently writing a history of death, grief and bereavement in Second World War Britain for Manchester University Press.

Dr Claudia Siebrecht is Senior Lecturer in modern history at the University of Sussex and her research interests include the cultural history of war, the history of emotions and visual history. She holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and has taught at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2013), has recently co-edited Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, 1870-1950: Raising the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and her current book project is a cultural history of concentration camps.