Organising Data: What Open Data Can Do

2 August 2021

James Benstead, Edinburgh Napier University

In this article I’m going to write about organising the data from the project on the Scottish War Books Boom, and how working with Open Data principles can identify new connections among the material and open up new avenues for scholarship.  The overall findings to date are discussed in a parallel article in this month’s TMR.  

Salt of the Sarkar: Interrogating the Politics of Salt in Across the Black Waters

8 February 2020

Sonakshi Srivastava, Indraprastha University

Set amidst the backdrop of World War I, Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters (1939)  highlights the anxiety of Indian soldiers who arrive in Marseilles after having risked the dreaded ‘kala pani’, which are black waters, rumoured to bring bad luck upon anyone who dares to cross them. A series of salty gastrocentric metaphors and imageries abound in the text to pronounce brimming tensions, and ideas of servitude between the soldiers and the Sarkar, their (English) master.

Book Review: Commemorative Modernisms

8 February 2020

Iro Filippaki, Johns Hopkins University

Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

Anyone who has ever dealt with a close bereavement knows that it inevitably begs the harrowing question of what to do with the body. This question, Alice Kelly writes in her book Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War, is the primary concern of modernism. Kelly’s monograph is an articulate, well-researched, and amply-evidenced study that combines history, material culture, and brilliant close-readings to trace the ways through which women writers reclaimed the realm of World War I and its dead from masculine, combatants’ experience.

International Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology of Lost Voices: An Interview with Connie Ruzich

8 February 2020

Connie Ruzich is a professor of English at Robert Morris University; her Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania. Ruzich was a 2014-2015 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Exeter, where she researched the use of poetry in British centenary commemorations of the First World War. She is the editor of International Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology of Lost Voices (Bloomsbury, 2020), and she runs the popular blog Behind Their Lines, which discusses poetry of the Great War. Her essay “Distanced, disembodied, and detached: Women’s poetry of the First World War” appears in An International Rediscovery of World War One: Distant Fronts (Routledge, 2020), and she contributed “Language and Identity: Introduction,” to be published in Multilingual Environments in the Great War (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021). You can follow her on Twitter @wherrypilgrim.

This interview was conducted by Edel Hanley (University College Cork).