Book prize for Emeritus Professor

Emeritus Professor Michael Roper, a social and cultural historian, has been awarded this year’s Social History Society Book Prize.

Professor Roper won the prize for his book Afterlives of War: A Descendants’ History (Manchester University Press, 2023), which documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War, revealing the contribution of descendants to the contemporary memory of the conflict.

Launched in 2018, the Prize rewards the best original works of social and cultural history by established authors. Books are nominated by their publisher and judged by an independent panel of judges.

In awarding the Prize, the judges described the book as “a thoughtful and original account of World War I’s lasting impact on descendants in Britain, Australia, and Germany, drawing on oral history and personal memory to offer fresh insights into war’s influence on 20th century culture and society. There is good analysis of the difficulties of reconstructing these memories and of the more complex accounts they suggest of the impact of the war on post-war culture and society than conventional interpretations”.

Professor Roper, from our Department of Sociology and Criminology, said: “The Society’s invitation to accept this prize arrived by email on the day after I retired from the University of Essex. For 40 years the Department of Sociology has been my academic home, but I am a social historian through and through, so to be honoured in this way by my colleagues gives me the greatest of pleasure.

“Afterlives of War: A Descendant’s History occupied the last ten years of my career. It is a book that combines different identities and perspectives: a historian of post-war childhoods; an interviewer seeking knowledge from descendants; and a descendant myself, with a First World War history on both sides of my family.

“It was a painstaking and, at times, challenging task to render these different identities in all their complexity in a single book, but it was also a labour of love, so I am extra pleased that my efforts have been recognised by my peers.”

The prize was awarded to Professor Roper at the Social History Society’s annual conference at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley.