In the year of the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, this conference aims to bring together scholars of the Cold War to assess the state of the field and discuss new directions and recent developments. With the post-cold war availability of new archival sources and growing interest in cold war espionage, surveillance and counter-intelligence, the field is rife with opportunities for rethinking some of its stock narratives about Communism and anti-Communism in the twentieth century. To foster an interdisciplinary discussion of Cold War narratives broadly defined–stories, myths, histories, memoirs, interpretations, representations, fictions, state records, visual images--this conference welcomes scholars from a range of fields--history, politics, literature, cinema, media, gender studies and other areas of cultural inquiry. After two decades of hot wars in the Middle East, tensions between Russia and the US, and acute concerns about the power and reach of the post 9/11 national security state, participants may also explore how the Cold War and its legacy may continue to influence the contemporary world.

Possible topics to be addressed include:
- New perspectives emerging from recently opened archives
- The Eastern European Cold War experience
- Popular and middle-brow cultural responses to the Cold War
- Changing narratives and views of the Cold War and/or its end
- Gender and/or sexual politics of the Cold War
- The Korean War
- Third World contexts for Cold War dynamics
- Transnational perspectives
- The role played by racialism and/or Orientalism in Cold War cultural politics
- New narratives about spies, agents of influence, double agents, etc.
- The Cold War in film, then and now
- The role of writers and artists in the Cold War
- Cold War history from a post-9/11 perspective

Please send abstracts of 250 words and a C.V. to Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet by March 5, 2014: agnieszka.soltysikmonnet@unil.ch