PHAIS Seminar Series Week 17: Professor Mark Connelly (History)

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

From Southern England to the Somme: chalk, landscapes and the English imagination

Professor Mark Connelly, University of Kent

As anyone who has walked the Somme battlefield knows, it is a land of chalk. This distinctive geology made a deep impression on British service personnel and it intertwined with pre-war British cultural concepts of chalk landscapes and the essence of English national identity, and the landscapes of southern England. Having experienced southern England in France, artists like Paul Nash and memoirists such as Sidney Rogerson, then made chalk a key element of English culture and its memory of the war in the 1920s and 1930s.

Biography

Mark Connelly is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kent. He is a specialist in the First World War and its commemoration with a particular interest in the work of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission in the 1920s and 1930s. 

The seminar will be delivered in person, but a Zoom link will be available for those who wish to attend remotely.