Megan O’Mahony (she/her) began her AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership provisionally entitled 'Representing and Remembering Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in the Second World War' in October 2020.
A partnership between IWM and the London School of Economics and Political Science, the project is concerned with how museums and memorials—as societally, nationally and internationally embedded spaces—represent (and do not represent) the diverse experiences of conflict-related sexual violence in the Second World War.
Megan is interested in questioning: Whose stories are made visible in these spaces? Whose stories are further obscured? What roles do museums and memorials play in responding to and shaping the memory of gender violence? At IWM, Megan is working primarily with curators of the new Second World War galleries to document the museum’s first permanent display of objects related to conflict-related sexual violence.
She also plans to visit museums and memorials around the world that engage with this subject from different perspectives, with a view to demonstrate patterns in how conflict-related sexual violence is remembered and represented transnationally.