As the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, social and political discourse has illustrated a key tension – whether to seek a return to ‘normality’, or to respond to this moment with global, national and local change.

This poses several important questions for historians. If an event on the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic only produces a ‘return to normality’, what does it take to cause significant historical change? Why might continuity and stability be desired by some? How should we even define change?

In order to shed some light on these questions and more, Change in the Postwar World, a one-day interdisciplinary PGR and Early Career conference, organised by PGRs at the Universities of Birmingham, Coventry and Nottingham, will be held on Friday October 1st 2021.

This conference will reappraise the postwar decades, during which populations wrestled with questions of change in response to global upheaval, including in the aftermath of the Second World War, decolonisation, the turbulence of the 1960s and the economic crises of the 1970s.

In doing so, it will highlight the ways in which the world underwent dramatic changes in the Twentieth Century, but also the areas which retained important continuities.

A range of themes will be covered by researchers presenting work in the arts, humanities and social sciences on the following topics:

• American literature
• Art History
• Cultural Memory
• History of Ideologies
• Intellectual History
• Military History
• Political History
• Polish History
• Sociology
• Urban History

Sessions will be held on Microsoft Teams with research presented and discussed.

We are also delighted to announce that the day will feature a keynote presentation by Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite of University College London.