Before I start, please may I assure regular followers (hi, Mum!) that I am contemplating a post on the new seasons of Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders and what they have to tell us about bereavement, survival and disability in the wake of the First World War.  In the meantime,  however, I will be spending the next three weeks teaching on this:

Changing Face of Heroism

If you haven’t already signed up, please do so.  If you have, please let anyone you think might be interested know about it.  It is completely free to register and join and you can take the course entirely at a pace that suits you.

As part of this course, our wonderful learning mentors, Chris Phillips and Philippa Read, will, I hope, be writing guest posts for this blog on aspects of heroism relating to their research, respectively wartime transport logistics (trains and canals) and classical references in French wartime culture and memory.  This is a new approach on the part of this blog, but one that I hope will lead to contributions by other students and colleagues who work in fields related to my research.  I hope you will make them all welcome.

And a final piece of publicity. The Legacies of War seminar series got off to a strong start in its third year with an excellent paper from Professor Roy MacLeod on ‘The Scientists Go To War’.  Our next meeting takes place on Thursday, 30th October at 5:15 in the Grant Room (Michael Sadler 3.11) at the University of Leeds when Dr Richard Smith (Goldsmiths) will be speaking on ‘Recovering West Indian Memories of the First World War’. Full details can be found here.  Please do join us if you are able to. All are welcome.