In September 2001, IWM (Imperial War Museums) and University College London initiated a series of conferences focusing on the interdisciplinary study of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict - a focal point of which is the study of material culture and memory through a hybrid approach which embraces archaeology, anthropology, cultural history, military history, art history, cultural geography, and museum and heritage studies. The aim of the conferences is to offer an intellectual centre of gravity for a wide variety of scholars who specialize in different aspects of twentieth and twenty-first Century conflict, but whose work centres on some aspect of materiality.
Curating the Great War, 13-14 September 2018

Curating the Great War formed part of IWM London’s 2018 Making a New World season.
The conference looked at how the First World War was and is represented and interpreted in museums across the world.

The establishment of First World War museums was an unpredictable and unsystematic process, materially, politically and temporally. Their inception and subsequent development, and the animating spirit which lay behind them, offer a rich field of research for scholars interested in public and governmental responses to the experience of war – both personal and national. Above all, it is in these museums that we one sees the most complete fusion of the material culture of conflict with its historical, political and experiential context.
This conference was organised by the University of Bristol and the IWM Institute.
Past conferences and publications
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Materialities of Conflict, 8 September 2001
Publication: Matters of Conflict Routledge 2004, Ed N J Saunders.
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Conflict Memory and Material Culture of the Great War, 11 September 2004
Publication: Contested Objects Routledge 2009, Eds N J Saunders & P Cornish.
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Bodies In Conflict, 16 September 2006
Publication: Bodies in Conflict Routledge 2013, Eds P Cornish & N J Saunders.
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Conflict Landscapes, 26 May 2007
Publication in preparation.
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Conflict and the Senses, 6-7 September 2013
Publication: Modern Conflict and the Senses Routledge 2017, Eds N J Saunders & P Cornish.