Societies After Hostilities: Coming Out of War
The 2025 Harry Ranken Memorial Lecture, hosted by the University of Glasgow's Scottish Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology, will be given by leading French historian Professor Guillaume Piketty.
Harry Ranken Memorial Lecture
Date: Thursday 06 March 2025
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Venue: Room 513 Lecture Theatre, Boyd Orr Building, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Student events, Alumni events
Speaker: Professor Guillaume Piketty
The 2025 Harry Ranken Memorial Lecture, hosted by the University of Glasgow's Scottish Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology, will be given by leading French historian Professor Guillaume Piketty.
Professor Piketty's lecture entitled “Societies After Hostilities: Coming Out of War” will focus on the sensitive, emotional and intimate dimension, as well as on the long-term prospects of this “coming out of war” particularly around the Second World War.
It will examine the possible sources available to historians for investigating such complex topics, the pitfalls that lie in wait for these historians, and how this work can affect them personally. The Second World War provides a wealth of examples, owing to its enormous scale, its great diversity of postwar experiences, and the extreme violence it saw. But other conflicts will be examined from a comparative perspective, and in possible relation to current events.
Guillaume Piketty is Professor of History at Sciences Po, in Paris. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of World War II in France and in Europe, and, more broadly, on war, resistance, coming out of war, and society from the US Civil War onwards. Notably, his work includes working on these subjects from the perspectives of the history of senses and sensitivities as well as the history of emotions and intimacy.
The lecture is free to attend but places need to be booked via The 2025 Harry Ranken Memorial Lecture Eventbrite page.