Armistice Lecture: Civilians on WWI's Mediterranean front

Civilians’ experiences of World War I on the Mediterranean coast – the war’s ‘forgotten front’ – will be the focus of this year’s annual Armistice Lecture, which takes place on Thursday 14 November.

UCL’s Professor Heather Jones will explore the impact of the conflict in the Mediterranean on civilians, focusing on aerial bombardment, blockade and population displacement. Her lecture will examine why the war’s effects on civilians were forgotten and how reincorporating them impacts how we understand the totalising processes of violence that were at the heart of the First World War.

While famous for its Western Front, World War I was far from a conflict restricted to the trenches of Northern France and Flanders. The war unleashed a series of land and sea fronts across the Mediterranean, including the maritime blockade of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, the Gallipoli, Salonika and Palestine land fronts, and the Central Power’s unrestricted submarine campaign.

Professor Jones is Professor of Modern and Contemporary European History at University College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914- 1920 (Cambridge, 2011) and For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War (Cambridge 2021), and over 50 chapters and articles on the Great War era

This free guest lecture is part of the Department of Languages and Cultures’ Armistice lecture series, with the generous support of the Vice-Chancellor’s Endowment Fund. Register now for the Armistice Lecture, which takes place on Thursday 14 November 2024, in Room G27, Edith Morley, Whiteknights campus, at 18:30.