Codebreakers and Groundbreakers: Women’s Work in the Second World War
18th September 2025 | Newnham College, Cambridge
Call for Papers (Postgraduate Students) – Deadline 21st March 2025
The organisers invite submissions for fifteen-minute papers on women’s work during the Second World War from students currently enrolled in any postgraduate programme.
This one-day conference builds on the exhibition ‘Newnham and Bletchley Park: Women’s Work in World War II’, which opened at Newnham College, Cambridge, in March 2024 and received national press coverage. The research uncovered 77 alumnae of Newnham College who were employed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War in a variety of analytic, decryption and translation roles. The classified nature of work at Bletchley prevented women from speaking about their employment in later years, requiring researchers to undertake a five-year project to piece together their vital contributions to the war effort.
The morning session of the conference will reflect on this research, its wider significance, and examine recruitment into secret work from other institutions. This will begin to create a context and suggest lines of enquiry which may be replicated. The afternoon session will extend the focus beyond classified employment, and consider other types of work women carried out during the Second World War. Here, we particularly aim to showcase new and innovative research from graduate students, and invite applications for papers that deal with topics and themes related to the employment of women in Britain during the Second World War.
Possible topics might include:
- The recruitment of women into the civil service and other government departments, either nationally or locally
- The creation of, and participation in, women’s military and civilian organisations
- Women’s accounts of their wartime work, such as oral histories, memoirs, diaries, or other types of life writing
- Professional and friendship networks developed during women’s wartime employment
- Studies that consider women’s wartime employment intersectionally with race, age, disability, class, and sexuality
- Contemporary emotional and artistic responses to women’s war work
- Global and imperial experiences of women posted overseas
- Post-war commemoration and memory of women’s wartime employment
Please send an abstract (max. 250 words) and a short biography (max. 100 words) to herwarwork@newn.cam.ac.uk by 21st March 2025. Requirements for travel funding within the UK will be discussed upon acceptance.
Informal enquiries can be sent to the conference organisers, Dr Gill Sutherland (Newnham College) and Chris Campbell (Cambridge Faculty of History) at the email address above. For further information about the exhibition, please visit: https://newn.cam.ac.uk/newnham-news/research-uncovers-secrets-of-newnham-women-sent-to-codebreak-at-bletchley-park
Image Credit: Wrens Operating the ‘Colossus’ Machine, 1943, Bletchley Park. Creative Commons License