British military encounters with Italian civilians, 1943-1946

The Italian campaign produced a notable literary output from British soldiers who were there. Gordon Lett's Rossano (1955), Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines (1971), Stuart Hood's Pebbles from my skull (1973) republished as Carlino (1983), all made strong impressions in the UK when they appeared. More recently James Holland's Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War 1944-45 (2008) has provided a new slant on how Italians experienced the end of the Second World War. This project would seek to examine the encounters that took place between British soldiers and Italian civilians, mining this rich seam of social history for new understandings of encounter in time of war.

IWM has a wealth of material on this subject. Official photographs and film document the course of the campaign in exceptional detail; personal letters and diaries, and oral history interviews provide strong evidence; and several of the official war artists were deployed in Italy - including Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden.

The student - with input from their co-supervisors - would decide how best to focus on a manageable and meaningful segment of this story. They might take a regional focus (a city or rural area where there was intense activity or a strategic base); a type of encounter - prisoner of war escapes, partisan activity, efforts at reconstruction, encounters with women, the Indian Army presence; a theme such as hunger and displacement; or a particular month of the war - in other words, a snapshot of activity at a particular juncture in the war.

The project offers the opportunity both for detailed historical research and also to engage with the theory and practice of oral history in Italy and the student would be expected to visit relevant archives and where possible to conduct their own oral history interviews.