Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War

Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999) and co-editor (with Paula Hamilton) of A Cultural History of Sound, Memory and the Senses (2017). Deborah Tout-Smith is Senior Curator, Home & Community, in the Society & Technology Department of Museums Victoria. She has curated major exhibitions including World War I: Love & Sorrow (2014), and curates Museum Victoria’s Military History, Home & Community and Childhood collections. Deborah is Vice-chair of the Board of ICOM Australia. Bart Ziino is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. He has published widely on the politics of memory and commemoration. He is the author of A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (2007), and editor of Remembering the First World War (2015).

Introduction: War, Emotion and the Museum; Part I. Emotions in Conflict: On the Battlefield and at Home; 1. Emotions and Memory in the Soundscapes of World War I; 2. Pompey Elliott, Australia’s Emotional General; 3. For the Duration: Surviving World War I at Home; Part II. Bearing the Wounds of War; 4. A Familiar Face: Wartime Facial Wounds and William Kearsey; 5. War Disability and the Centenary of Family Caregiving; Part III. Emotions in Histories of World War I; 6. Searching for Hector Thomson: Telling Difficult Family War Histories; 7. "Gonzo" Historians and the Emotional Turn in Australian Military History; 8. Distance, Intimacy and Identification: Reflections on Writing a History of Trauma; Part IV. World War I in the Museum: Love and Sorrow at Museums Victoria; 9. After One Hundred Years: Exhibiting World War I; 10. "Sticky" Objects, Faces and Voices in the Museum: Love and Sorrow’s use of Affective Interpretation Strategies to Challenge Masculinist Commemorations of World War I; 11. "The Stories are like Magnets": Love and Sorrow and the Engagement of On-Line Learning; Index