Skip to main content

About the Project and Series

The interdisciplinary and transatlantic project and series Gender, War and Culture explores how gender, an amalgam of ideals and practices that gives meaning to and socially differentiates male and female, contributed to the shaping of warfare and the military and was at the same time transformed by them. The project and the series focus on themes such as the cultural representations of military and war, war mobilization and demobilization, war violence, experiences on the home and battle fronts, and the consequences of participation in war and the military for citizenship, and post-war cultures and the memories of war.  We cover the development of warfare since 1600 and have – as much as possible – a global scale, thus allowing for comparisons as well as an assessment of transnational influences on the relationship between gender, military and warfare. While its main subject is the entangled histories of gender, war and military culture that focus on Europe and the Americas (including the Caribbean), this history has to include the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building originating from sixteenth-century Europe, and their aftermath in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia. Thus we aim 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.

The interdisciplinary and international research project Gender, War and the Western World since 1600 will result in:

The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War and the Western World since 1600

(Published October 2020 by Oxford University Press)

Directors of the Research Initiative and Editors of the Oxford Handbook are:

Related to the Interdisciplinary and International Research Project are:

The Carolina Gender, War and Culture Seminar and Workshop Series

The Carolina Gender, War and Culture Studies (GWC) Series strives to create opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue, intellectual collaboration, and scholarly camaraderie for faculty and students of the broadly defined theme of gender, war and culture based in North Carolina. Hosted on a monthly basis at the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the seminars are open to members of the academic community throughout the state of North Carolina and beyond: faculty, graduate students and interested undergraduates students are welcome. Past seminars have spanned medieval, early modern, and modern history from a global perspective and have represented a wide range of disciplines from cultural studies to history, from literary studies to political and social science.

For more information click here.

GWonline, the Bibliography, Filmography and Webography on Gender and War since 1600

The Digital Humanities Project, the Online  Bibliography, Filmography and Webography on Gender and War  since 1600, is a cooperation of the UNC History Department, UNC ITS Research and the UNC Libraries. It collects and organizes secondary literature, women’s autobiographies, films and informative websites on this subject of Gender, War and the Western World since 1600 to make them available to the public.

For more information  click here.  To go to the GWonline website click here.