Karen Hagemann

The handbook contracted with Oxford University Press will be a reference work of 34 essays. The collection, covering the period from ca. 1600 to the present, will investigate how gender, an amalgam of ideals and practices that give meaning to and socially differentiate male and female, contributed to the shaping of warfare and military culture and was at the same time transformed by them. The essays will explore this by focusing on themes such as the cultural representations of the military and war and their role in war (de)mobilization, the interconnectedness of the military and civil society and its transformations, war violence, war experiences on the home and battle fronts, the consequences for citizenship of participation in war and the military, attempts to regulate and tame warfare and to prevent new wars by peace movements, international agreements and institutions such as the United Nations, and post-war cultures and the memories of war. The handbook will cover the major periods in the development of warfare since the seventeenth century chronologically. While its main geographical focus is on Europe and the Americas (including the Caribbean), this history needs to include the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building that originated in sixteenth-century Europe and their aftermath in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia. Thus the handbook allows for both temporal comparisons that explore continuities and changes in a long-term perspective and regional comparisons as well as an assessment of transnational influences on the entangled relationships between and among gender, warfare and military culture. As the general editor, I will work together with the co-editors on the editing of the chapters of the handbook.  In addition, we will write the general introduction and the four introductory overviews together. My own contribution to the handbook is  a chapter entitled “History and Memory of Army Women and Female Soldiers  in the Age of World Wars in Transatlantic Comparison”, which is the start of my work on the next monograph “Gender, War and Memory:  Women and the Military in the Age of World Wars”. It will explore in a comparative perspective the various ways in which women were mobilized for the military in World War I and II as nurses, auxiliaries, female soldiers and partisans. It will examine their deployment and experiences, their perception by the contemporaries and their place in the collective memory of these wars.