Please note: this event has passed
Chair: Dr Mark Condos, Lecturer, War Studies Department
Speakers:
Professor Susan Carruthers, Professor of US/International History at the University of Warwick
Professor Gregory A Daddis, USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History and Director of the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University
Professor Kara Vuic, LCpl Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in Twentieth-Century America at Texan Christian University
Professor Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck University
Dr Aaron Hiltner, Lecturer in United States History at UCL
About the book
Abstract: Are ‘Dear John’ letters lethal weapons in the hands of men at war? Many US officers, servicemen, veterans, and civilians would say yes.
Drawing on personal letters, oral histories, and psychiatric reports, as well as popular music and movies, Susan L. Carruthers shows how the armed forces and civilian society have attempted to weaponize romantic love in pursuit of martial ends, from World War II to today. Yet efforts to discipline feeling have frequently failed. And women have often borne the blame.
This sweeping history of emotional life in wartime explores the interplay between letter writing and storytelling, breakups and breakdowns, and between imploded intimacy and boosted camaraderie. Incorporating vivid personal experiences in a lively and engaging prose – variously tragic, comic, and everything in between – this compelling study will change the way we think about wartime relationships.
This event will launch Professor Susan Carruthers’ new book exploring the history of the “Dear John” letter, using multiple perspectives and voices to examine wartime relationships and breakdowns
Speaker biographies
Professor Susan Carruthers specializes in US and international history, with particular expertise on the role of media in war, cold war culture, and colonial COIN across the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work is interested in how individuals and societies have made sense of conflict and its aftermath. She is the author of several books, including Winning Hearts and Minds(Leicester UP, 1995), The Media at War (Palgrave 2000 and 2011), Cold War Captives (California UP 2009), and The Good Occupation (Harvard UP, 2016). Professor Carruthers’ latest book, Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines romantic intimacy in the US military through a reading of ‘Dear Joh’ letters.
Professor Gregory A Daddis is the USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History and is Director of the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University. Professor Daddis specializes in Cold War history, with a focus on the American war in Vietnam. He is the author of five books, including Fighting in the Great Crusade: An 8th Infantry Artillery Officer in World War II (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2011), Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017). His most recent book, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines(Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines how men’s adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes and masculine identities of American soldiers during the Vietnam War.
Professor Kara Vuic is the LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in Twentieth-Century America at Texan Christian University. Professor Vuic is a specialist in twentieth century American military history, with a particular focus on the gendered, social, and cultural impacts of war on American society. She is the author of The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Harvard, 2019), Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), and is also the editor of The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military (2018).
Professor Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck University. Professor Bourke’s wide-ranging work has examined topics including women’s history, gender and masculinity, working-class culture, the history of emotions, psychiatry, and medicine, sexual violence, and histories of war. She is the author of 13 books, including Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland, 1890-1914 (Clarendon, 1993), Dismembering the Male: Men's bodies, Britain and the Great War (Reaktion, 1996), An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (Granta, 2000), Fear: A Cultural History (Virago, 2005), Rape: a History from 1860 to the Present(Virago, 2008), Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-human Love (Reaktion, 2020), and is also editor of War and Art (Reaktion, 2017).
Dr Aaron Hiltner is Lecturer in United States History at UCL. Dr Hiltner specializes in the history of the United States, and his work focuses on empire, ecology, the military, foreign relations, and masculinity. His first book, Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front, was published Chicago University Press in 2020 and examines civil-military conflict in the US mainland during the Second World War.
2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Department of War Studies by Sir Michael Howard, and provides an important opportunity to both reflect and build upon his remarkable achievements and legacy. Sir Michael Howard’s greatest contribution to the history of war was his insistence on moving beyond the battlefield in order to examine the wider political and social contexts in which wars were fought. He also wrote about the legal, moral, and philosophical implications of war, and throughout his distinguished career sought to develop new approaches to understanding the impact of war on society.