Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kent, where he runs the interdisciplinary MA programme, First World War Studies. His main research interests are in the fields of modern military history, war and commemoration, and the public image of the armed forces. He is Director of the AHRC-funded centre for public engagement with the Great War centenary, Gateways to the First World War, and is lead convenor of the War, Society and Culture seminar programme at the Institute of Historical Research. He is also a consultant to the BBC's World War One at Home project and is a member of the government's schools battlefields tours project run by the Institute of Education, as well as being a member of the advisory committee for the Imperial War Museum's Lives of the First World War and the National Archive's Operation War Diary projects. He is currently researching the nature of Ypres as a memory site, working in close collaboration with the In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper/Ypres. Among his publications are The Great War: Memory and Ritual; Steady the Buffs! A Regiment, a Region and the Great War; The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training and Deploying the British Army, 1902-1914 (with Tim Bowman); and Creating Celluloid Memorials: British Instructional Films and the Memory of the First World War. his publications are The Great War: Memory and Ritual; Steady the Buffs! A Regiment, a Region and the Great War; The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training and Deploying the British Army, 1902-1914 (with Tim Bowman); and Creating Celluloid Memorials: British Instructional Films and the Memory of the First World War.