The Academic World in the Era of the Great War by Marie-Eve Chagnon & Tomás Irish

Author:Marie-Eve Chagnon & Tomás Irish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Conclusion

Trinity College Dublin’s set of connections to the academic world were not unique in the period in question, but its simultaneous experience of war and revolution was. Both the outbreak and conduct of the Great War and the consequences of revolution at home threatened to fundamentally undermine its institutional identity, an identity which was the consequence of the university’s real and imagined embeddedness in scholarly networks. It took the events of 1914–1918 to bring these out into the open. For many scholars, institutions and even academic disciplines, the Great War was a single overwhelming rupture in their lives, which brought academic work, collaborations and relationships to a halt for four years, and sometimes longer. While the process of demobilization proved challenging to many academics in the 1920s, the issues involved were—with some exceptions—relatively clear. And while death—the ultimate rupture—could not be undone, individuals developed practices for mourning those whom they had lost in the war, with war memorials becoming part of the topography of university campuses across Europe and North America. Ultimately, the quest to return to “normal,” a vision of the pre-1914 world, was complex but possible for many universities, at least in the short term, before another global conflict emerged. For Trinity College Dublin, the issues were much less clear; it had to deal with ruptures in the academic world, in the fabric of its own community of students and staff, and in the immediate political and cultural context of British and Irish society. There would be no return to pre-1914 normality.

Notes

1.John F. Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society 1870–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: a History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “The Role of British and German Historians in Mobilizing Public Opinion in 1914,” in British and German Historiography 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 335–372.

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