Dr Rachel Muers, Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies at the University of Leeds, has been funded by the Everyday Lives in the First World War Centre.
The project, ‘Re-imagining True Social Order: How the Aftermath of War Shaped Quaker Social Witness’,
explores the extensive and continuing effects of the First World War, and its aftermath, on the social and political attitudes and activities, and the theology, of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. The aim is to bring out the deep connections – both historical and theological – between questions being asked now by British Quakers about their faith community and its social and political action, and British Quaker responses to the First World War. This will in turn broaden and deepen the conversation about contemporary Quaker social witness – and provide a fresh way for non-Quakers (within and beyond the academy) to understand Quaker contributions to campaigns for social justice in the twenty-first century.
Rachel is the fourth colleague at the University of Leeds to receive funding from the AHRC First World War Engagement Centres for collaborative projects, working with community groups, schools, museums and other organisations. The other three are Professor Alison Fell, for a project focusing on the dramatization of a First World War nurse’s diary, Dr Ingrid Sharp, working on social attitudes to Conscientious Objection, and Dr Claudia Sternberg, for a project looking at Internment Camps in Britain and Germany.