Writing the Air War and Lincolnshire Conference

Writing the Air War and Lincolnshire Conference at the International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln, convened by Bishop Grosseteste and the University of Lincoln and sponsored by the Lincoln Record Society.

The conference titled ‘Writing the Air War and Lincolnshire’ will be held at the International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) in Lincoln on the 11th and 12^th of May 2024. Convened by Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) and the University of Lincoln, plus generously supported by the Lincoln Record Society (LRS), the IBCC has been chosen due to its close connection to the conference theme – as well as the values of recognition, remembrance, and reconciliation that it promotes.

The conference represents a collaborative and interdisciplinary project, intended to disseminate original research on how air war has been represented and experienced across and through a range of textual forms such as biography, memoir, newspapers, inscriptions, original ‘grey literature’, plays, and screenplays. These forms in their turn draw upon a wide spectrum of primary records, ranging from official and company records to personal sources, such as diaries, letters, and ephemera, each of which call for particular approaches in source criticism and have particular needs in selection and archiving.

Given Lincolnshire’s prominence in the history of aviation, there will be a strong focus on the county’s sources and perspectives. A session of the conference will be devoted to the wartime letters of Lincolnshire teacher Dorothy May, recently edited for publication by Richard Morris, David Stocker and Michael Bassett. Two LRS titles will feature in a special book launch session: P. & R. Malcolmson (eds), A Parson in Wartime (2017) and Ralph Ottey’s A Jamaican in Lincolnshire (2024).

Leading authority on the air war, Prof Richard Overy, is our keynote speaker; he and several other eminent participants will combine their national and international perspectives with Lincolnshire-specific ones to foster broader cultural and contextual understandings. The programme also includes a book launch with BGU lecturer Prof. Andrew Jackson's new monograph being one of the books that will be presented.

This conference is a major event, being staged to acknowledge and examine the significance of warfare in the air in the twentieth century. Speakers will talk of its importance in the history and culture of the county of Lincolnshire, and also explore its wider impact, relevance and legacy, nationally and internationally. Prof. Andrew Jackson

The organisers of the event, Professors Claudia Capancioni and Heather Hughes, are looking forward to the two-day conference.

''We are thrilled to have a varied and rich programme that together with established names, includes up-and-coming ones offering diverse perspectives which pay attention to, for example, civilian experiences of war, Caribbean RAF service volunteers, transnational resistance, and Black British airmen.”

In addition to academic papers the conference will include guided tours, exhibitions of artefacts, and the aforementioned celebration and launch of books.

You can find the programme and the link to register here and a downloadable full conference programme and speaker bio information here.

For further information, please contact either Prof. Heather Hughes (hhughes@lincoln.ac.uk) or Prof. Claudia Capancioni (claudia.capancioni@bishopg.ac.uk).