What is the History of Violence Network?

The history of violence is now the subject of extensive research across every historical field of enquiry, and features prominently in the work of the Department of History at the University of Warwick. The History of Violence Network brings together Warwick’s academic staff, post-doctoral researchers, doctoral students, and MA students with shared research interests in aspects of the history of personal, social, political, and cultural violence. Our research and teaching on the history of violence covers interpersonal violence comprising lethal violence (murder and manslaughter), non-lethal violence (assault and rape), and consensual violence; collective violence (carnival, charivari, and massacres); individual and group political violence (riots, strikes, terrorism and revolution); and state violence against the individual (execution, punishment, terror). The Network also investigates cultural polemics and violence. We also ignore the traditional differentiation of war from violence.

The Network is strongly interdisciplinary in its approach to research on the history of violence, drawing on anthropological, economic, emotional, environmental, gender, geographical, legal, medical, philosophical, political, psychological, rhetorical, sociological, spatial, and visual approaches. The Network ranges from the late Middle Ages to the present, and reaches across the globe with members working on Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and the imperialisms of the early modern and modern eras.

The Network organises occasional seminars, workshops and conferences, these being located in the various research centres within the Department of History, as well as running an annual Summer School on ‘Histories of Violence’, supported by the EUTOPIA group of European universities.

Summer School

Violence is a multi-faceted phenomenon that appears in a wide variety of, what would seem at first glance, unrelated contexts. Whether it be at the state level in colonial practices and political discourse, or at the more personal level of drink-related violence, there is a conceptual thread that runs through each expression consistently, allowing researchers to work with violence as a broad theme across time and space.

With a thirst to explore this further, a summer school on the history of violence was held at TU Dresden between 2-8 July 2023 in cooperation with The University of Warwick and within the EUTOPIA initiative, in order to gain an interdisciplinary insight into the histories of violence while encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing across the partner institutions. ... Read MoreLink opens in a new window.