Janet S.K. Watson

Areas of Specialty

Twentieth-century European cultural, modern Britain, gender.

Current Research Interests

The evolution of British representations of the First World War; national identity, memory, and the Second World War.

Biography

Janet Watson is from Providence, Rhode Island. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she completed her Ph.D. in British and European history at Stanford University in 1996. Her book, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain, reflects her interests in cultural and social history and gender studies. She is now at work on a book tentatively called Telling War Stories: Culture, Politics, and the Second World War in Britain, 1979-1995.

Selected Publications

Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Paperback edition, 2007.

"Wars in the Wars: The Social Construction of Medical Work in First World War Britain," Journal of British Studies (October 2002).

"The Paradox of Working Heroines: Conflict Over the Changing Social Order in Wartime Britain, 1914-1918," in Michael Mays and Douglas Mackaman (eds.), World War I and the Cultures of Modernity (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

"Khaki Girls, VADs, and Tommy's Sisters: Gender and Class in First World War Britain." International History Review, vol. XIX, no. 1 (February 1997)

Photograph of poppies by Benoit Aubry.