On Thursday I presented my first conference paper based on my Ph.D research.
The paper was entitled "The Enemy Within: British Fascism in Alternate Histories of the Second World War" and was pretty well received.
I presented it at the annual PG Conference run by the School of English at the University of Liverpool. It's a pretty comfortable affair and a great place to cut your teeth on your first paper. Essentially, all the Ph.D students are supposed to give papers over the course of the day to an audience consisting of other students and some lecturers.
I had a pretty considerable audience for my paper, although I suspect most of them were there to see other other papers in my panel (19th and 20th century literature), the much more experienced Kim Edwards Keates, Katharine Easterby and David Hering.
I was pretty happy with the content of the paper, which forms a chunk of the material from Chapter One of the thesis (as it currently stands) and may add to it with an eye for submitting it for publication to some journals. That said, I'm not entirely comfortable with publishing it in its entirety online, however below is the abstract, and you can see the slide show here.
"The Enemy Within: British Fascism in Alternate Histories of the Second World War"- Abstract
More recent alternate histories have bucked the trend of Britain as a glorious resister of Nazi authority and instead focused on the dirty underbelly of anti-Semitism and fascism in British society in the 1930s. My paper will analyse a series of novels which do just this: the "Small Change" series by Jo Walton; I will discuss how reading these novels, and others like them, encourage a re-reading of the historical narrative of time whilst at the same time inform our understanding of the present.
