Streetscapes of War and Revolution (Claire Morelon)

How might we capture historical events like war and revolution from street level? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Claire Morelon (University of Manchester) tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how private courtyards, shop windows, graffiti and darkened public transport might shed light on changes in political regimes. She reflects upon how conflict shaped a place as far away from the front as Prague throughout the First World War, and indeed how such a study might productively collapse strict binaries between the battlefield and home front.

Claire Morelon is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920 (Cambridge, 2024), which won the Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power, the Lynn Hollen Lees Prize for Best Book in European Urban History and the Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize. She recently published, with Mary Elisabeth Cox, an edited volume titled Hunger Redraws the Map: Food, State, and Society in the Era of the First World War (also Cambridge, 2025).