This project explores the cultural, social and psychological aftermaths of war from a comparative transnational perspective, examining a number of major wars across the globe in the modern era: the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the Crimean War (1853-1856), the First (1914-1918) and Second World Wars (1939-1945), and the civil wars in the United States (1861-1865) and Greece (1946-1949). Its focus covers Australia, the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, Greece, the Middle East, and Japan. It examines both defeated as well as victorious nations, thus allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the deep impact of war and its aftermaths across a variety of experiences and contexts, historicising the concept of trauma and war’s traumatic impact over time. It aims to undertake this study through three areas of analysis:

• First, it explores responses to global dislocation and displacement of refugees from a national, international and transnational perspective.

• Second, it examines the brutalisation of war and its traumatic impact on societies and cultures in post-war periods.

• Third, it considers the manner in which traumatic aftermaths are remembered across cultures and across time periods.

By connecting these three central themes in a range of conflicts it will for the first time enable a broader and more complex understanding across time and place of the experience of civilians and combatants in the aftermath of war. In so doing, this project challenges periodization, which delineates between periods of war and peace, and explores how war continued to cast a long and inescapable shadow on those who endured it. Its unique contribution to scholarship is to undertake a more fully integrated study connecting the historical forces which shape displacement, violence and trauma over this longitudinal period and in so doing offer a new transnational and comparative history of the impact of the wars of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries.