An International Interdisciplinary Workshop
School of History and Archives
University College Dublin
12/13 January 2007

Proposals for papers are requested for an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Propaganda and the Mass Media in the Making of Cold War Europe’. The workshop will explore how post-war European identity was reinvented in the late 1940s and 1950s, as Cold War propaganda re-imagined a Europe divided into two ideologically antithetical blocs. The workshop organisers invite contributions both on the construction of these new identities in the media, the political authorities’ attempts to control and ‘spin’ the media, the impact of these campaigns on public consciousness, the emergence or extension and impact of the new technologies of radio and television, and the emergence of a new youth and dissident culture in the later 1950s.

The workshop aims to bring together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines and regional expertise in order to explore how, in the early Cold War years, the mass media were instrumental in the reinvention of Europe’s cultural identity. By involving young pioneering researchers and established scholars, the workshop will investigate the reshaping of European public consciousness through propaganda, culture and ideology from the perspective of a reunited Europe.

The workshop will last for two full days. Particular interest centres on the following themes:
I) Redefining Europe East and West: Ideology, Identity, and Mass Media
1) Ideology in the Making of Cold War Culture
2) New Technologies – New Mentalities
3) National Identity and Propaganda in Cold War Europe

II) Power, Propaganda, and Censorship in Cold War Europe
4) The Cult of Leadership
5) Censorship and Self-Censorship
6) Ideology on the Air Waves

III) Rewriting History: Memory and Totalitarianism
7) Reinventing the Recent Past
8) Challenging the Past: 1956 and the Emergence of a New Culture in “East” and “West”

IV) Round-Table ‘Postwar’: The Early Cold War in Transnational Perspective

The workshop will take place at the Humanities Institute of Ireland (University College Dublin). Proposals of not more than 250 words and a brief CV should reach the organisers by 15 June 2006. Presentations are limited to 25 minutes.

Contact details:
Dr Judith Devlin (judith.devlin@ucd.ie)
Dr Christoph Müller (christoph.muller@ucd.ie)
School of History and Archives
University College Dublin
John Henry Newman Building
Belfield, Dublin 4