Call for Papers: The Intimate Front: Marriage, Gender, Relationships & (Para)military Identities

Friday 5th June 2026, King’s College London

Co-organised by LAHP-KCL students Hannah Cogan and Sophy Higgins.

This conference examines how marriage and intimate partnership – legal, customary, and illicit – shape and are shaped by military and paramilitary worlds across place and time. We invite work that situates intimacy within armies, police and gendarmeries, intelligence and security services, insurgent and guerrilla formations, militias and private military companies, colonial and occupation forces, and veterans’ associations. We are interested in how the identities of people in intimate relationships were formed and refashioned through their interactions with military and paramilitary organisations; how institutional categories and controls – including marital status, allowances, housing, dependents’ passes, disciplinary codes – influenced partners’ legitimacy and acceptance; how spouses, partners, and lovers resisted or leveraged organisational and social frameworks to make and unmake themselves; the emotional economies of love and longing, including the management of absence and return, and language of fidelity, honour, and sacrifice.

Potential themes:

• Marriage policy, allowances, pensions, and widows’/orphans’ claims
• Camp followers, garrison towns, and military households
• Wartime romance, ‘war brides’, fraternisation, and intermarriage across enemy lines
• Domestic labour, correspondence, remembrance, and emotional care
• Lesbian, gay, queer, and other non-heteronormative intimacies
• Opportunism, transactional relationships, sex work, and survival strategies
• Law, religion, and regulation of marriage/sex; divorce, bigamy, and desertion
• Veterans, disabilities, memory, and the family after war
• Colonial and post-colonial constabularies; race/caste/class and intimacy

How to apply:

We welcome proposals covering a timespan from medieval to contemporary, and any geographical region. Scholars at any career stage – including postgraduate research students – are encouraged to apply. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome.

Please provide an abstract (max. 300 words) for a 20-minute paper proposal; a short statement on how the research fits into the conference theme (max. 150 words); and a short bio, including institutional affiliation (if any).

Submissions are due by Sunday 1st March 2026. Please combine all materials into a single PDF and submit to the KCL conference organisers, Hannah Cogan, Sophy Higgins and Désirée Hotz, at intconf2026@gmail.com. Please send any queries to the same email address. Submissions will be reviewed by the Organising Committee and applicants will be notified in mid-March 2026.

Thanks to kind funding by the British Commission for Military History, the conference will be free to attend, but we are unable to assist with travel or accommodation costs. We look forward to your proposals and to building a global, comparative conversation on relationships and (para)military identities.