Public Lecture: Feeling Violence: Emotional Suffering and Gender in Austria's First World War

Where did the violence of the First World War take place? The increasing totalisation of warfare, new technologies of destruction, and the mobilisation of entire societies blurred the boundaries between battle and home fronts, bringing civilians and combatants into an increasingly interconnected landscape of war. This was particularly apparent in Austria-Hungary, a vast, multiethnic empire whose war unfolded across multiple fronts and occupied territories.

In this lecture, Dr Louise Earnshaw asks how ordinary Austrians experienced violence across these different spaces, considering what their accounts can tell us about what they understood as violence. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and autobiographical writings, the lecture explores how life-writing can reveal experiences that are otherwise difficult to recover. Reading these accounts through the lenses of gender and the history of emotions, the lecture traces fear, shame and resentment to uncover an ‘affective economy of violence’: the cultural frameworks that shaped what could be understood and expressed as violence, and which forms of harm remained unspoken.

Dr. Louise Earnshaw is a cultural and gender historian of the First World War and modern Austria, specialising in histories of violence and emotion. They recently completed their PhD at the University of Leeds, and are now a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, where they are developing a new project on the politicisation of emotions among veterans in interwar Austria. They have published work on cultures of vulnerability and care and the emotional legacies of captivity and homecoming. Alongside their research, they work in Teaching and Learning at the University of Manchester Library.