Beyond 1945: Rethinking the end of the Second World War

Conference programme
19 January 2024

9:00 – 9:15 (all times CET)
Opening remarks
Thomas Bottelier and Guillaume Piketty (CHSP)

9:15 – 10:30
Panel 1: The environmental history of war termination

• Alex Souchen (University of Guelph):
  Using the oceans for disarmament: Global munitions dumping after the Second
• Chad Denton (Yonsei University):
  Demobilising metals: The Vichy Salvage Service and exiting the war

10:30 – 11:00
Coffee and tea break

11:00 – 12:30
Panel 2: Political community and war termination in Europe and the Americas

• Nicholas Courtman (King’s College London):
  Volksdeutsche into West Germans: Dealing with Nazi naturalizations of ethnic Germans in the 1950s
• Alexandre Fortes (Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro):
  Brazil’s transition out of war and racial democracy
• Olivier Burtin (Université de Picardie):
  Veterans, the state, and political community in the United States

12:30 – 12:30
Lunch break

13:30 – 15:00
Panel 3: Intimate and collective experiences of coming out of war

• Ruth Lawlor (Cornell University):
  Sexual violence and coming out of war
• Lorena De Vita (Utrecht University):
  Negotiating reparations for victims of National Socialism, 1939-present
• Julie Le Gac (Université de Paris Nanterre):
  Coming out of a ‘war of nerves’ 

15:00 – 15:30
Coffee and tea break

15:30 – 16:45
Panel 4: The political violence of war termination in Europe

• Félix Streicher (Maastricht University):
  The continuum of violence in Luxembourg-occupied Germany, 1945-46
• Olga Byrska (European University Institute):
  Unachieved left-wing revolutions in Britain, France and Poland, 1944-48

16:45 – 17:00
Break

17:00 – 18:00
Keynote address & concluding discussion

Camilo Erlichman (Maastricht University):
The problem of the end: Rethinking the ‘postwar’

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