Dr Ann-Marie Foster

Research Fellow

Department: Humanities

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow on the AHRC funded project 'Ephemera and Writing about War, 1914 to the Present'. The project is led by Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus, and the team also includes Prof Catriona Pennell, Dr Tony Williams, Mr May Sumbwanyambe, and Dr Chris Kempshall. After completing my AHRC funded PhD at Northumbria University in 2019 I Lectured Public History at Queen's University Belfast. In the past I have also taught at the Universities of Durham and Sunderland.

My research focuses on interrogating how ephemera can offer a way of understanding the past. I am currently working on my first book, which explores how families memorialised the dead after war and disaster in the early twentieth century, arguing that ephemera was of the utmost importance to daily mourning rituals. I have also written about why families donate objects and ephemera to war museums, and am interested in how familial and cultural memory is built through these collections of everyday material. My new research project has two strands. The first is to find ephemera of marginalised people who served, or experienced, the First World War and its aftershocks, which will allow the wider project team to (co)create responses to it. The second strand of my research concerns life writing, and asks how ephemera across different forms of personal writing have shaped the modern memory of the First World War.

Email Ann-Marie

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

My research interests are the First World War, ephemera studies, memory studies, and public history.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Bombardment, Public Safety and Resilience in English Coastal Communities during the First World War: MICHAEL REEVE, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. £100 hardcover. 390 pages. ISBN: 978-3-030-86850-5), Foster, A. 10 Nov 2023, In: Northern History
Complicated Pasts, Promising Futures: Public History on the Island of Ireland, Foster, A. 31 May 2023, In: Public History Review
How to Remember the Victims of Covid-19: Experiences of the First World War, Foster, A. 9 Nov 2022
The Bureaucratization of Death: The First World War, Families, and the State, Foster, A. 1 Dec 2022, In: Twentieth Century British History
The Barry Urban District Council, disaster relief funds and civic society, 1913–1934, Foster, A. 1 Nov 2021, In: Urban History
Commemoration, Cult of the Fallen (Great Britain and Ireland), Foster, A. 5 Aug 2020, 1914-1918 Online, Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin
Rebecca S. Wingo, Jason Heppler and Paul Schadewald (eds), Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (Cinncinati: Cinncinati University Press, 2020). Pp. 225. Paper $32.95, E-Book, free 1, Foster, A. 5 Apr 2020, In: Public History Review
Review: What is Public History Globally? Working with the Past in the Present, edited by Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik: What is Public History Globally? Working with the Past in the Present edited by Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik, xxi + 356 pp.; notes, illustrations, index; clothbound, $79.20, paperbound, $24.67, eBook $27.32., Foster, A. 7 May 2020, In: The Public Historian
"We Decided the Museum Would be the Best Place for Them": Veterans, Families and Mementoes of the First World War, Foster, A. 6 Jun 2019, In: History and Memory
‘I am sending herewith’ – First World War Ephemera at the British Library, Foster, A. 2 May 2017, In: electronic British Library Journal

Qualifications

History PhD June 11 2019
Fellow, Advance HE FHEA

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