‘A charred and battered peninsula’: artistic reflections on the Dardanelles and other sites of memory

New Zealand Studies Network presents:
Professor Paul Gough
‘A charred and battered peninsula’: artistic reflections on the Dardanelles and other sites of memory
6.00 to 8.00 p.m. Friday 18th January
Birkbeck, University of London (Room Malet St 254)

To book: please email info.nzsn@gmail.com

In an illustrated lecture Paul Gough will reflect upon his sojourns in the 1990s in the memory-scapes of Gallipoli, exploring the charred headlands of the Dardanelles Peninsula, the once-hidden trenches and dug-outs of New Zealand troops; and then in France, Belgium and Salonika. The resulting drawings and paintings were shown at New Zealand House in London and at the National War Memorial in Wellington. Gough has also written about the way war artists learned to describe emptiness and abandonment. His lecture will focus on how New Zealand artists have articulated their vision of war and peace.

Professor Paul Gough, painter, broadcaster and writer, has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, most recently in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and is represented in several permanent art collections. His research interests lie in the processes and iconography of commemoration, the cultural geographies of battlefields, and the representation of peace and conflict in the 20th/21st century. Paul Gough has worked for ITV, BBC and C4 on creative arts programmes ranging from dance to drama, poetry to painting. He is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UWE, Bristol

Please reply to info.nzsn@gmail.com if you wish to attend.

Canadian WW1 Out of the Trenches project

Library and Archives Canada launch Out of the Trenches: A Linked Open Data Project video


Produced by the Pan-Canadian Documentary Heritage Network, the video highlights new work in mapping archive collections across Canada. It uses multimedia to showcase records and photographs and includes some examples of individual soldier's life stories, recreated using primary source materials.

Partners of the Pan-Canadian Documentary Heritage Network (PCDHN) have developed a "proof-of-concept" to showcase a sampling of the network's wealth of digital resources using "linked open data" and principles of the semantic web. The underlying premise is to expose the metadata for these resources using RDF/XML and existing/published ontologies (element sets) and vocabularies, maximizing discovery by a broad user community.


The partners selected the First World War as the topic for the digital resources to be contributed to the proof-of-concept. The metadata for these digital resources was provided by five partner institutions.
Archives Canada also has an older site with war diaries and archives records which you can search.

Service and Sacrifice: Colonial Troops and the First World War

Service and Sacrifice: Colonial Troops and the First World War


Speaker: Sonya O. Rose (BIH Visiting Fellow)

Wednesday 14th March 12.30 - 2.30 Room G16 Birkbeck Main Building

This event is free - register here

This seminar will explore what historical scholarship suggests about how the meanings of the key wartime concepts of service and sacrifice resonated across Britain’s colonial empire. It will consider what it meant under different circumstances to ‘volunteer’ and will assess how colonial participation in the war effort was secured and with what consequences. The issues of gender, race and national consciousness will be central to the discussion.

If interested in this event do check out the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library catalogue for books published on African, Asian, Caribbean, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand contributions to both world wars, as well as archive collections which include Australian and New Zealand, Caribbean and African contributions.