Project team
Meet The Team
We are a team of six researchers. Find out more about us here:
Ann-Marie Einhaus
Ann-Marie is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University Newcastle. She is the author of The Short Story and the First World War (2013) and editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts (2017) among others. Her research interests and publications cover the early twentieth-century short story, writing about the First World War from 1914 to the present day, the reception of foreign literature in Britain during the inter-war period, and British wartime and inter-war magazines. Ann-Marie’s research on this project looks at literary writing about the First World War and how authors use ephemera to tell new stories about the war – her special emphasis has been on contemporary authors working through links between war and empire, such as Kamila Shamsie, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Andrea Levy.
Tony Williams
Tony is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northumbria University. His research encompasses poetry and prose and he is also interested in the ways that writers think and talk about writing. On this project he has been researching and writing a historical fantasy novel which engages with ephemera to address questions around war-related trauma outside of mainstream memory, and Tony has also been working with May Sumbwanyambe to articulate the role of ephemera in creative practice.
May Sumbwanyambe
May is a librettist, radio dramatist, academic and award winning playwright from Edinburgh. He is currently commissioned to write new stage plays and TV Series about the historical visibility of Black peoples in Scotland. Beyond creative writing, May is a lecturer of Creative Writing at Northumbria University and is currently writing his PhD, 'A Practice-Based Investigation into writing Post-Black History Plays', at the University of York. May has written a stage play as part of this project which used ephemera to imaginatively recover Black and working-class experiences in the aftermath of the First World War in Glasgow. The play will be produced by Citizens Theatre Glasgow. May has also been working with Tony Williams to articulate the role of ephemera in creative practice.
Catriona Pennell
Catriona is Professor of Modern History and Memory Studies at the University of Exeter. She specialises in the history of 19th and 20th century Britain and Ireland with a particular focus on the relationship between war, empire, experience, and memory. She has published on various aspects of the experience of the First World War and understandings of cultural historical approaches to the study of modern conflict more generally. She is now working on a volume on the British Empire and the First World War as part of OUP’s ‘Greater War’ series. Catriona’s current research explores the relationship between youth, education, and the transmission of cultural memory. She acted as a consultant on a number of initiatives during the centenary with organisations including the British Council, the BBC, and the Department for Education. She has also led or co-led a number of externally funded projects including the AHRC-funded ‘Teaching and Learning War Research Network’ (2017-2021) and the ‘Reflections on the Centenary of the First World War: Learning and Legacies of the Future’ (2017-2021).
Ann-Marie Foster
Ann-Marie is a public historian, with a particular focus on the First World War and its ephemera. They are the author of the book Family Mourning after War and Disaster in Early Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2024). Their research interrogates how and why ephemera is crucial to understanding how we remember the past. It asks why people keep the things that they do, and why they donate items to museums and archives. Ann-Marie is now a Chancellor’s Fellow at Robert Gordon University and also holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Early Career Fellowship in Cultural and Heritage Institutions based at Imperial War Museums (2024-2026). As part of their IWM fellowship, they are investigating how to increase access to digital heritage collections. As a Research Fellow on this project Ann-Marie pursued two strands of enquiry. The first was to find examples of ephemera which show the experiences of marginalised people in wartime throughout archives across Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Their second research strand examined where ephemera are mentioned in life writing (diaries, memoirs, autobiographies) to understand when and how cultural ideas of ephemera as a shorthand for war experiences emerged.
Chris Kempshall
Chris is a historian of allied relations in the First World War as well as popular representations of history and warfare in modern media, particularly computer games and the Star Wars franchise. He is the author of numerous academic works including two books, The First World War in Computer Games (2015) and British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (2018). He has also served as a consultant for various First World War computer games. As part of this project, Chris has been working with cultural organisations, community groups and individuals with an interest in war-related ephemera, including ephemera belonging to Black and other ethnic minority groups. Alongside this he has been researching the use of ephemera in historical computer games.
Alison Fell
Alison is a cultural historian of France and Britain, Professor of French Cultural History and Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool. A veteran research project lead, she has kindly agreed to be an external advisor on our project, sharing her immense subject expertise in First World War studies and her wide-ranging leadership experience. Alison has been researching women's experiences in, and cultural responses to, the First World War in France and Britain since 2003, most recently reflected in her second monograph, Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War (2018). She was PI of the AHRC-funded project Tracing the Belgian Refugees (2018-2020), Co-I of the AHRC Gateways to the First World War Public Engagement Centre (2014-2018), and has consulted for and been interviewed on a variety of TV and radio productions, including David Olusoga's BBC documentary The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (2014).