Authored Book
Nehring H, Douthwaite J, Alberti SJMM & Harper S (2024) Cold War Scotland. Edinburgh: NMS Enterprises Ltd - Publishing.
Project
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Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Collaboration with National Museums Scotland.
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a climate of international tension, the Cold War is more relevant than ever. And yet a generation now has no experience of it, and its public history is uneven. The Cold War's character as an 'imaginary war' in the global north poses special challenges for public engagement, especially for exhibiting material objects in museums. Synthesising approaches from material culture studies and Cold War history, critical heritage studies and museum practice, our project - a partnership between National Museums Scolandf and the University of Stirling's Division of History, Heritage and Politics - analyses these challenges and proposes a new framework for a Cold War museology. We focus on the process we call 'materialising the Cold War': the transformation of artefacts from the immaterial context of the Cold War to material objects in museums. National Museums Scotland and the University of Stirling will apply these multi-disciplinary methods to co-produce a major exhibition and schools programming, and we will generate innovative resources and outputs for museum users, heritage professionals and academics. In addition, our project partners - Royal Air Force Museums, Imperial War Museums, the Norwegian Luftfartmuseum in Bodø, and the Allied Museum in Berlin - will benefit significantly from our findings.
Framed by this international context, Materialising the Cold War will ask of UK museum objects:
1) Why have they been collected? 2) How are they displayed? How have people responded to this 'fearsome heritage' - those who remember the Cold War and those who don't, whether family museum visitors, school groups, or dedicated enthusiasts?
Throughout, we emphasise the fundamentally unstable and contested nature of the ways in which Cold War objects are made to mean something, and the breadth of the emotional register they stimulate.
Our project will therefore:
Total award value £352,040.00
Chair in Contemporary European History, History
Post Doctoral Research Fellow, History
Authored Book
Nehring H, Douthwaite J, Alberti SJMM & Harper S (2024) Cold War Scotland. Edinburgh: NMS Enterprises Ltd - Publishing.
Article
Covering the 'Scottish position adequately': Post-war Scotland, 1948–59
Douthwaite J (2024) Covering the 'Scottish position adequately': Post-war Scotland, 1948–59. Modern British History, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae039
Other
Avoiding Armageddon: Tales of Cold War Britain, from nuclear threat to ghost bunkers and posh spies
Douthwaite J (2023) Avoiding Armageddon: Tales of Cold War Britain, from nuclear threat to ghost bunkers and posh spies. Douthwaite J (Other) [Television] Channel 4.
Teaching Resource
Where does one era end and the other begin? Teaching the Cold War through a Second World War context
Douthwaite J (2022) Where does one era end and the other begin? Teaching the Cold War through a Second World War context. SATH, pp. 42-47.
Audio
BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking: Cuba, cold war and RAF Fylingdales
Douthwaite J (2022) BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking: Cuba, cold war and RAF Fylingdales. [Radio programme] 20.09.2022.
Article
Douthwaite J (2022) 'Is Radioactive Iodine Present Equally in the Cream on Milk as in the Milk Itself?': Lonely Sources and the Gendered history of Cold War Britain. Gender and History. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12643
Website Content
H-Diplo Article Review 1113- "Pre-enacting the Next War"
Douthwaite J (2022) H-Diplo Article Review 1113- "Pre-enacting the Next War". [Blog post] 01.06.2022. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/10310003/h-diplo-article-review-1113-pre-enacting-next-war
Newspaper Article
Douthwaite J (2022) New world order. New Statesman. 20.04.2022, p. 17.