The meeting will feature guest speaker Professor Aaron William Moore of the University of Edinburgh, as well as updates on the society’s recent activities. After the meeting there’s an optional social in the pub, which you are also welcome to attend.

Professor Aaron Moore’s talk will focus on war diaries, and what they tell us about how language, media, and culture in wartime shape our identities and what we think is true.

About the speaker

Professor Aaron William Moore is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is a comparative historian who has worked with materials in China, Japan, Russia, the US, and Great Britain, publishing on combat soldiers’ diaries in Writing War (Harvard, 2013), civilian accounts of air raids in Bombing the City (Cambridge, 2018), and personal documents by wartime children and youth in a number of articles and book chapters.

He has co-edited two new volumes, How Maoism Was Made (Oxford, 2024), which features new work on early PRC Chinese diary writers, and The Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Reader: Mass Culture and Intermediality in Interwar Japan (Bloomsbury, 2025), which includes his original translations of the path-breaking intellectual Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke.

He is currently finishing a book on transnational wartime youth entitled What Can Be Said, and a series of articles on science fiction, wartime violence, and the memories of Japanese occupation among Taiwanese indigenous communities. His research has been previously supported by the AHRC, British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2014 he was awarded the Leverhulme Prize.

About Glasgow Humanists

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