The Military History Consortium (MHC) will be holding its second annual conference on 4-6 June 2025 at Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon in Lisbon, Portugal.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Professor Richard Reid (University of Oxford).

The organising committee invites panel and individual paper proposals on any aspect of military history and the history of war and conflict in its broadest sense, ranging from ancient to modern times and spanning the entire globe. This includes the cross-chronological interactions between political, economic, social, and cultural history with military history. In line with the MHC’s aims, panels and papers that cover periodically and geographically under-represented areas (e.g. Antiquity and the Global South) are especially welcomed. A key aim of the MHC is also to provide a platform for and support the development of early career scholars, and therefore submissions from PhD students and postdocs are strongly encouraged.

Panel proposals should consist of:

• 3 papers and 1 chair/discussant
• 500 words rationale and presentation of the panel
• 300 words abstract for each paper
• 150 words short bio for each contributor

Individual paper proposals should consist of:

• 300 words abstract
• 150 words short bio

The submission deadline is 15 December 2024. The organising committee will inform potential participants on whether or not their paper/panel has been accepted by 17 January 2025.

Please send your submissions as pdf or word documents by email to Prof. Marco Wyss (m.wyss@lancaster.ac.uk), Prof. Evert Kleynhans (kleynhans@sun.ac.za), and Prof. Bruno Cardoso Reis (bruno.cardoso.reis@iscte-iul.pt).

The MHC

The MHC connects institutions, academics, and students engaged in the study of warfare and/or military organisations in the past. Its dual aim is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas in order to strengthen international research cooperation, and a framework for joint teaching initiatives and programmes. The MHC’s membership is international, and its scope is global. While the consortium’s teaching and research agendas focus on the past, it seeks to address contemporary security challenges and inform related policy debates. It is only the study of war and the military in the past that enables us to understand and contextualise the present and thus prepare for the future.

Members

• University of Amsterdam
• University of Calgary
• Stellenbosch University
• Sciences Po Aix
• Lancaster University
• Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon

The inaugural MHC conference was held at Lancaster University in June 2024. It featured research on military history from the ancient world to today, by delegates from across the MHC member institutions, as well many other universities – from Cambridge to Edinburgh, the University of London and Portsmouth in the UK, to Bologna, Geneva, Lisbon, Potsdam, Trinity College Dublin, Utrecht and Uzhhorod in Europe, and beyond from Chicago, Mississippi, Texas, Zambia and Free State. The keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Tarak Barkawi (Johns Hopkins University), on ‘Fighting and the Production of Military History: The US in the Korean War’.