The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East

Join Tammy Proctor and Susan Grayzel for a discussion with Michelle Tusan about her latest work The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East.

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“In The Last Treaty, Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe’s War with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919. She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe’s dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would profoundly shape the post-war world.”

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Michelle Tusan is a professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. Before coming to UNLV in 2001, she was a Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford. A British historian by training, her teaching and scholarship broadly engage the relationship between geopolitics, culture, and human rights. She is the author of The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill (2017/2019); Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East (2012); Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (2005) and articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Modern History and Past and Present. She also has published a co-authored textbook, Britain Since 1688: A Nation in the World. She is the Vice President/President Elect of the North American Conference on British Studies.

Tammy M. Proctor is Distinguished Professor of History in the Department of History at Utah State University. She teaches modern European and world history. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Proctor holds degrees in journalism and history from the University of Missouri and a PhD in history from Rutgers University. Dr. Proctor’s recent publications include An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Diary of Mary Thorp (2017), with Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Gender and the Great War (2017), with Susan Grayzel, and World War I: A Short History (2017). She is presently working on a study of American humanitarian aid in Europe from 1914-1924.

Susan R. Grayzel joined the faculty at Utah State University in 2017, teaching classes in modern European history, gender and women's history, and the history of total war.  Her most recent publications include Gender and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2017), co-edited with Tammy M. Proctor. Her previous books include Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999) and At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids & Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (2012). She is engaged in two current research projects; one tracing how the civilian gas mask came to embody efforts to address the consequences of chemical warfare in the British empire, c. 1915-45, and the second with Prof. Lucy Noakes (University of Essex) on gender, citizenship, and civil defence in twentieth-century Britain.

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The NACBS Book Launch Series features NACBS members who have recently published books in the field of British Studies. Events are open to the public and include a discussion with the author. We hope that members will participate in this new series and encourage any interested members who have an upcoming publication date, or have published books in the past six months, to sign up here.