Combat, Spectacle, Sport and War

The brutality of the Roman practice of having people fight, often to the death, as a means of entertainment has ensured its enduring place in the popular mind. Yet the history of sport and war are more closely entwined than this outlier suggests. Medieval hunts and tournaments shaped the knight’s body for war, just as hunting in Mughal India trained warriors to fight from horseback, and Japanese Yabusame archery fuses training sport with religious ritual. Likewise, modern-day social media observers ‘like’ and ‘share’ short, often gruesome clips of combat from Ukraine to the Middle East with all the relish of Roman spectators at the arena.

Image: 'Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant' (Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1859). Public domain: Yale University/Wikimedia Commons.

Keynote speaker
Professor Amalendu Misra, Lancaster University, on social media in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

Accepted papers include:

• News, spectacle, and entertainment: A defence of Britain’s First World War journalists
• From war to gladiatorial combat: The reinvention of conflict in George Chesney’s 'The New Ordeal'
• Music hall amusements: Japanese martial arts in Edwardian Britain
• Patrons, profits and professionals: The economics of gladiatorial combat in Ancient Rome
• Cultures of combat: E-sports, materiality, and the future of war as spectacle
• Clash of cultures: Jiu-Jitsu's global journey and nationalist resistance
• 'Training for a non-violent life': Pacifism and sport as a method of minimising conflict in interwar Britain
• 'Playing the greater game': Britain, war and the sporting metaphor
• Pitching patriotism: Baseball in American Second World War propaganda posters
• Preparing for war through football: A case study of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the 1930s
• Sport and the embodied symbolics of war and spectacle

Why not take the opportunity to visit our blockbuster exhibition. 

Gladiators: Heroes of the Colosseum

Tickets: Adult £6.50.