Konstantinos’ research focuses on the afterlife of ancient Greece and Rome in the Western world, and several of his publications examine the representation of ancient history on stage and screen. Lee is a military historian, focusing especially on military unrest and indiscipline during the time of Alexander the Great and in the early Roman empire. He contributed a reflective conclusion to a collection of essays which Konstantinos masterminded, published in 2023 as Brill’s Companion to ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film. 

As Konstantinos puts it, ‘Celluloid antiquity is saturated with images of combat’. In our discussion, we dig deep into how ancient war and peacemaking have been depicted in film from the 1960s to the present day. We track changes across time in the cinematic representation of ancient violence and heroism, in relation to developments in film history and contemporary socio-political contexts. Films such as Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Troy, 300, Gladiator, and Hercules are all unpicked; and along the way we discuss the ways in which they construct masculinity, humanise action heroes, stigmatise Others, and normalise war as a pathway to 'greatness'. We consider how political and military events have influenced the representation of ancient warfare on the one hand, and how films depicting ancient warfare have become commentaries on contemporary contexts on the other. Konstantinos and Lee also discuss the future of 'sword-and-sandel' movies, including the role that AI may increasingly play, and the real-world impacts of evolving trends in cinematic depictions of ancient warfare.

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

John is a professor of ancient history at Christopher Newport University, specialising in the history of Achaemenid Persia and its relations with Classical Greece and ancient Anatolia, during the 6th-4th centuries BCE. He is the author of Persian Interventions: the Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta 450-386 BCE (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and co-editor of Brill's Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires (Brill, 2024), and he has a new book just out called Persia's Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Empire on the Achaemenid Frontier (Oxford, 2025).

Rhyne is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, who also researches the Achaemenid Persian Empire, drawing on Greek historiographical sources (Herodotus, Xenophon, etc.) and documentary evidence in Middle Eastern languages such as Akkadian, Elamite, and Aramaic.His first book, published with the University of California press in 2025, is called The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire. 

This episode digs into different conceptualisations of peace and peacebuilding across the Achaemenid Persian Empire, exploring it both from a domestic viewpoint and in the light of interstate relations. We touch on sources such as the famous Cyrus Cylinder, and its ongoing resonance in Iranian identity-building and international politics today. And we explore the peace rhetoric of kings such as Darius I, as seen in e.g. the Bīsotūn monument. The conversation considers the relationship between peace and order, peace and the gods, and peace and 'paradise'; and we also discuss the insights which ancient Persian peace imaginaries might offer on modern concepts and practices.

We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Erika has recently published a book called Demanding Witness: Women and the Trauma of Homecoming in Greek Tragedy, which investigates how the trauma of female characters is represented and received in four ancient Greek tragedies about war's aftermath. To quote Erika’s own summary of the book: ‘it argues that tragic representations of female noncombatants’ trauma after war expose the ripple effects of violence that wars create, even for individuals and communities distant from the fighting. Yet female characters’ trauma is also difficult to recognize and address because doing so challenges social hierarchies and ingrained power structures. As a result, these characters’ testimonies bring about a conflict of witnessing for other characters and the audience.’ 

Erika’s research into the structural and chronic violence done to women who have survived war through the marginalisation of their wartime experiences – and into the efforts some of them go to, to bear witness and have others also witness their trauma – offers important insight into habits of visualising war and their intersection with wider social structures and hierarchies. 

The podcast starts with a discussion of the 'trauma hero narrative', which tends to focus attention on men’s (and especially soldiers') wartime experiences and their post-conflict journeys. As Erika argues, it is not simply the case that women’s experiences of wartime trauma are given less visibility and narrative attention than men’s, but also that women’s suffering in Greek tragedy is often staged to expose male concerns – male agency, male inner conflict, male suffering, even. For this reason, we often see women in Greek tragedy having to go to some lengths to 'demand witness' to their own experiences. 

As well as demanding witness to war's most obvious kinds of impacts, the women we encounter in Greek tragedy also experience more 'ambiguous' kinds of trauma, as Erika explains. We discuss 'chronic trauma', which does not centre around or get resolved by singular events; 'insidious trauma', i.e. the gradual accumulation of trauma that can be exacerbated through power imbalances and marginalisation; and the ripple effects of 'perpetrator trauma' which can flow as a moral injury to those associated with the original perpetrator. Erika also discusses moments in Greek tragedy where we see women losing control of the trauma narratives that are told about them and 'the trauma survivor's mental and emotional estrangement from their own story.'

Erika reflects on the role that Greek tragedy can play in sharpening our awareness not only of the different kinds of traumas that women can experience in and through war but also of our habits of picturing and narrating it. And she also discusses the role that modern trauma theory can play in helping us read ancient Greek tragedies in new ways.

We hope you find the episide interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Polly is a historian of ancient Greece, with a particular interest in political history and interstate relations. Her 2007 book on Interstate Relations in Classical Greece examined the norms and ethics that shaped relations between Greek city states, the scope and enforcement of ‘international law’, and the complexities of diplomacy across the Classical period. An expert on Greek inscriptions, she has published on many other aspects of Greek political history – including imperialism, political mechanisms for restoring or ensuring stability, discourses of victory and defeat, and the commemoration of the war dead in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.

Hannah’s research focuses on Roman socio-political history, and she is particularly interested in Roman imperialism, discourses of power, ideas of peace and approaches to diplomacy. Her 2017 book Pax and the Politics of Peace examined the two generations that spanned the collapse of the Republic and the Augustan period in order to understand how the concept of pax Romana evolved, as a central ideology of Roman imperialism. She has also published multiple articles and chapters on the representation of Roman peace-makers in literary accounts, on negotiation and diplomacy during the Roman civil wars, physical sites of diplomatic practice, and the performance and theatre of diplomacy – among other topics. 

In this episode, we explore Greek and Roman understandings of peace and approaches to peacemaking. Polly and Hannah discuss the sources available to us, whose experiences of peace they particularly foreground, and what they can tell us about how ideas of peace evolved across antiquity. We consider the relationship between peacemaking and imperialism, habits of truce-making, the intricacies of diplomacy, and peace as a performance. The episode covers several hundred years of history, considering civil war contexts as well as interstate relations, and differences between democratic Athens and Rome under the Principate. We hope you enjoy the conversation. It's a long one, because of the ground we cover, so we'd suggest you listen in two halves!    

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Her work in this space has involved researching many forms of violence that fall short of full-blown war, and this has culminated in her most recent book, published in 2024 by Princeton University Press, titled They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. Covering 500 years of history, from 1400-1900, it shines a spotlight on the many forms of violence (from raiding and enslaving to small wars and sudden massacres, all hallmarks of European imperialism) that regularly took place during times of so-called peace – calling into question how we categorise and define both peace and war. 

In the podcast we dig into the book's findings, as Lauren outlines her interest in writing a different kind of global history which incorporates different cultures and perspectives and which looks beyond 'great battles' and the classic war stories we are all used to reading. 

She helps us grapple with the whole spectrum of what she calls 'violence at the threshold of war and peace', noting that so-called 'small' wars have never had small impacts on the people involved. We discuss truces and their potential to drive, not just end, conflict; and Lauren outlines the violence inherent in many peace-keeping responses and 'protection emergencies', which securitise, other and control people, especially in the context of imperial power. 

Lauren draws attention to the role that domestic households have long played in the 'constant drumbeat' of recurring violence that accompanies imperialism, and also to the intersection of 'regimes of armed peace' and racism. We discuss ancient and modern examples, reflecting on how blurred the boundary between war and peace often is. And we discuss what is at stake in exactly how we categorise and name different forms of violence, as e.g. full-blown war, insurgency, a 'special operation', or peacekeeping. 

Lauren underlines the extent to which we continue to anticipate and accept ‘small wars’ as ‘a structural, even expected, condition of interpolity relations’; and she notes the tragic irony of our assumption that it is only by conducting this kind of supposedly ‘protective’ violence that we might achieve future peace. 

We hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation about recurring patterns of conflict that history often overlooks. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

The episode starts by diving into some WWII literature to explore the concept of chronophobia: a dread of both past and future, coloured by the in-between-ness of a long period of conflict that followed on from the First World War and led into the Cold War. As Beryl explains, anxieties about past and future are common to many wartime experiences, but they take on some specific resonances during WWII. Along the way, we also explore 'micro temporalities' during wartime, such as the anxiety that builds during a day about what night-time air raids might bring. 

We move from discussing 20th-century 'war in the skies' to discussion of the impact that drone technologies are having on how we visualise war itself, as well as how people in conflict zones get viewed. As Beryl underlines, drones promote habits of viewing that are often top-down, imperial and securitising, with a host of real-world consequences for different people on the ground. We discuss the importance of countering this with more bottom-up ways of looking at contemporary wartime experiences, and this leads to some conversation about the roles that art can play in showing us war from new perspectives. This podcast connects to conversations in previous episodes with Julian Wright, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox and Paul Lushenko and Jerilyn Packer. We hope you enjoy the discussion.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Discover why peace narratives have received far less scholarly attention than war stories, and how Prof. König's team is working to change that by investigating whose voices and experiences are reflected in ancient accounts of peace and reconciliation.

What can ancient approaches to conflict resolution teach us about modern peacebuilding? In this thought-provoking special episode, we explore how elite-centered peace narratives shaped societal attitudes in antiquity and continue to influence our understanding of peace today. Prof. König reveals how her interdisciplinary network is "reading against the grain" of ancient sources to uncover ordinary people's lived experiences of peace—voices that have been historically marginalized but might offer valuable insights for contemporary peace literacy.

Don't miss our conversation about bridging academic research with creative outreach, as Prof. König shares details about the network's collaboration with a professional theater company, NMT Automatics, and the upcoming multi-authored publication, "New Visions of Ancient Peace." This episode offers a perfect blend of historical scholarship and practical application, demonstrating how ancient wisdom might help us visualize and build more effective paths to peace in our modern world. 

We hope you enjoy the episode.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Alice has recently co-edited a new book with Nicolas Wiater, on ancient conflict narratives, called Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay between Conflict Narratives in Different Genres and Media (Routledge 2025). In this podcast episode, Alice introduces the book and discusses some of the themes at the heart of it.

In particular, she explores the conception of visualisation: the ways in which narratives of war not only reflect or depict conflict but also envision it, in ways that shape how conflict gets pursued or prevented in the real world. She also discusses the role that interplay between narratives and discourses can play in cementing and amplifying influential war imaginaries. And she considers the impacts which all of this war-storytelling has on ordinary lives in the everyday. 

In the process, Alice reflects on connections between ancient habits of visualising and narrating war and modern discourses and behaviours. Among other topics, she wonders why narratives of peril and danger seem more attractive than narratives of peace; what consequences might flow from ancient tendencies to euphemise or romanticise violence towards women; and what force military metaphors have in civilian contexts, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The episode ranges back and forth between antiquity and modernity, as Alice discusses militarism(s), the narrative role of children in war storytelling, the complex relationship between discourses of war, knowledge and power, and many other such topics.

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

As Joe has written: ‘People resort to violence for all kinds of reasons. In the interests of peace, it is essential to understand how people may be incited toward organised violence. …In warfare, combatants are often incited towards their actions by others, and in the ancient world, such incitement frequently took the form of a pre-battle speech: Greek, Roman and Jewish literature contains many examples.’ In unpicking a wide range of ancient pre-battle speeches, and exploring recurring components (such as the othering of enemies, claims about the just or necessary nature of upcoming violence, a commander’s handling of his soldiers’ fears, and visualisations of success), Joe’s research contributes not only to a deeper understanding of how warfare was conceptualised and driven in antiquity but also to wider reflections on how organised violence can be conceptualised, justified and incited today.

We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Joe’s work on Jewish and Hellenistic identities, and their cross-cultural interactions, has led to further research on ancient Jewish texts written in Greek, which enable us to understand aspects of the shared culture of the ancient Mediterranean world; and he has become very interested in women’s practices and rituals in Judaism. Both of these research interests feed into his current project, called Fighting Talk: Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism, which examines the nature of pre-battle speeches in ancient Jewish texts and their relationship to established forms of pre-battle exhortation in Greek and Roman sources.

Because the politics of the region in this period are so complex, we have recorded a Part 1 and a Part 2 for this podcast. In this episode, Part 1, Joe  talks us through Jewish interactions with other groups and political powers in the region from around 175BCE to the early 2nd century CE – to help us understand the history of Judea and Jerusalem, and the ways in which ongoing conflict (near and far) shaped Jewish practice and identity, not just at the time but for many centuries afterwards. In Part 2 (which we hope you will also listen to, because it’s super interesting!), Joe  dives deep into some of the textual sources from the period, looking particularly at the ways in which they visualised battle itself and justified war.

We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and his other works have had a profound impact in the 20th and 21st century. While film versions of his books have particularly influenced habits of visualising war, Tolkien's views on peace have lots of relevance in the modern world. In this episode we discuss how peace and peacebuilding get represented in Tolkien’s corpus, the author’s personal experiences of war, and his attitude to pacifism. The conversation falls into four parts, exploring ideas of peace via Tolkien's representation of the four main races of Middle-Earth: elves, orcs, dwarves and men. 

One feature of Tolkien’s works is his nostalgic view of a world in steady decline. After a glorious golden age, the successive eras of mortals are increasingly damaged by constant wars and injustices. Here, we see a very clear parallel with the Golden Age of antiquity, as well as with other mythologies throughout the world. No race embodies this diminishing 'golden age' as much as the elves, and discussion of them gets us thinking about Tolkien's nuanced perspectives on peace. To what extent is peace modelled as an escape (available only to some), as an ideal rather than a feasible, sustainable reality? And what can other characters - like the Ents - contribute to our understanding of why people go to war and what peacebuilding might involve? 

Sauron and Orcs come particularly to mind when we visualise war in The Lord of the Rings. As Prof. Pezzini explains, the mythology behind orcs is murky, with their origins purposefully hidden, and they act much of the time as a stand-in for 'the other', a faceless, evil enemy that is easily demonised. In recent times, they have made their way into popular culture; for instance, some Ukrainians have referred to Russian soldiers as 'orcs'. However, Prof Pezzini reminds us that Tolkien's representation of orcs (outlined in a letter to his son) included some empathy and pity, not just dehumanisation.  Similarly, his representation of dwarves and men encompasses both belligerence and more positive qualities, and this enables Tolkien to explore aspects of both war and peace with greater nuance. While reflecting on the more militarising nature of film versions of Tolkien's books, Prof. Pezzini helps us to unpick different ways of visualising war and peace across his literary corpus, in relation to his own wartime experiences, offering lots of food for thought in relation to contemporary conflict.  

We hope you enjoy this episode, as we travel to the fascinating world of Middle-Earth while trying to make sense of our own understanding of peace-building in the real world. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Albert Surinach I Campos

Debby is a Quaker from Godalming in Surrey, who was trained and served in the South Hebron Hills earlier this year (2023). Robert discusses with her what an ‘average’ day as an EA looked like, what accompaniment actually is, and why ‘principled impartiality’ is so important. Debby explains how her experience has shaped her life back home, how it has led to her current advocacy and activism and the importance of local engagement for peace. During the podcast, she discusses both the pragmatic and more abstract aspects of the work, from spiritual practices for peacekeepers to how to see and understand both sides of a deep-rooted conflict. She describes the importance of EAs’ protective presence, especially against the backdrop of the current violent flareup of the conflict, in the wake of Hamas' attacks on October 7th and Israel's military response.

This episode reflects Robert's wider research interests in the role of religion in peacebuilding, and what the advantages and disadvantages of neutrality are for NGOs working in conflict-affected areas.

We hope you find the conversation interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, including some of Robert’s museum entries on Neutrality, Impartiality and EAPPI, please visit the please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. 

We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In the episode, Johanna first delves into the different aspects of love and care that are important to consider when designing trauma-informed education for citizens and health-care professionals. Paul then shares his personal story of how a sense of communal care and inner peace were crucial for his own healing, discussing also how trauma affects the human mind and body over time. Both Johanna and Paul emphasise that the path towards sustaining peace – in Northern Ireland and elsewhere – depends on the collective reflection and co-operation of a caring community. To build such a community in practice, WAVE brings citizen education to the forefront of their work; their trainers bring different generations together in remembering the conflict and also in promoting trauma recovery through multiple generations. 

We hope you find our conversation interesting.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young 

Sound mixing by Harris Siderfin

Music composed by Jonathan Young 

Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

During the podcast, Roxani explains her reasons for embarking on this important work and what difference she hopes it will make to how we understand and approach war and peace. She also reflects on the value of taking love and care into account in broader political contexts, emphasising how vital loving and caring practices are to all  humans. Drawing on her experience of peacebuilding work on the ground, Roxani highlights the subtle acts of care and love that regularly occur in areas affected by conflict. Despite their recurring importance in everyday life, little attention gets paid in peacebuilding theory to the powerful impact which they can have. In noting this, Roxani invites us to think carefully about the voices and experiences of peace and conflict that often get marginalised, and who we should consciously make space for in future conversations. She suggests that by looking beyond conventional academia, we can pay attention to, and recognise different perceptions of love, care, and peace, which is an essential aspect of taking love and care seriously in peacebuilding.

Audre Lorde discusses (self-) and communal care, in the books A Burst of Light and Sister Outsider. On self-care beyond candles and baths, Roxani recommends this recent article. The Mercy Corps project and publications led by Dr Kim Howe which Roxani references on the podcast are available here. Roxani also references bell hooks’ conceptualisation of love as a practice in the book All About Love; and Q Manivannan’s work on care, grief, and protest.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Visualising Peace Project. 

• What recurring stories do individuals and communities tell about war’s aftermath, conflict resolution, peace and peace-building in art, text, film, photography, news reports, museums, music, sculpture, gaming, and other such media?
• Are narratives of peace always constructed in relation to narratives of war? And what (if anything) makes any given narrative identifiable as a ‘peace story’? 
• Whose narratives or ideas of peace dominate in different parts of the world, and why?
• And what role can peace-storytelling play in peace-building? 

As she explains, we are surrounded by images and narratives of war, but much less 'literate' in peace and peace-building. Our virtual museum aims to make a modest contribution to wider efforts to render peace-making more visible, more discussed, and better understood, by generating more conversation about what peace looks like to each of us. Our aim is to harness the power of story-sharing to illuminate different habits of visualising peace and their influence (actual or potential) on how it is experienced, promoted, created and sustained. 

Our project is both disruptive of entrenched habits and generative of new or different ways of thinking about, and working towards, peace. By juxtaposing a myriad – or a kaleidoscope – of different manifestations of peace, we aim to question, challenge and stretch assumptions and interpretative frameworks; and we hope that our array of ‘exhibits’ not only helps to make peace more visible and more broadly understood but also more tangible and realisable in the everyday.  

In the podcast, Alice tours listeners through a range of items in each virtual room, highlighting the diversity of media and perspectives. She reflects on the ethics of visualising peace for others, and also on the importance - and challenges - of incorporating different voices and experiences. The museum was conceived as a collaborative project, and Alice encourages museum visitors to offer feedback and suggestions for new items to include in the museum. 

As she explains, the structure of the museum encourages visitors to explore open-mindedly, and we hope that each visit to the museum represents an ongoing process of critical discovery of possibly endless conceptualisations. The ideas and images of peace that we have curated are not to be taken didactically; they merely offer an opening to further reflection and inquiry. We do not wish this project to be seen as the be-all and end-all of how one should or could visualize peace. Rather, it is a metaphorical call to (lay down) arms in a collaborative, open-ended exploration of prevailing habits and alternative ways of picturing, framing, evoking and engendering peace, through many different lenses. Inclusive conversation on this topic is important because peace is conceived and made by all of us, not just by experts. 

We hope you enjoy this tour of our peace museum. For a version of our podcast with images and close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about the Visualising Peace project on our website.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young. 

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young. 

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young. 

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young. 

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young.  

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.  

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young.  

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.  

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young.  

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.  

Our theme music was composed by Jonathan Young.  

The show was mixed by Zofia Guertin.  

• Who are the primary state and non-state actors in outer space today? 
• What dangers does conflict in space present and why should we, as individuals, care? 
• How does peace in space help maintain peace on earth? And how can peace in space be promoted, improved and maintained?
• How can we best visualise peace in space when outer space itself is so difficult to conceptualise? 

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• What kinds of war stories are children of different ages most regularly exposed to in different parts of the world (through films, gaming, school curricula, local folklore, graffiti, news reports, and so on)? What aspects of war dominate the narratives that children are exposed to? And what narratives about war’s aftermath, conflict transformation and peace-building tend to circulate in the media that children most frequently engage with?
• What do children and young people think about dominant modes of representing war and peace in different media? How do they describe the impact which different narratives of war and peace have had on them? And how differently might they represent or narrate war, conflict transformation and peace, if they were in charge of the storytelling themselves? 
• Finally, what impact can children’s voices have on entrenched adult habits of visualising war and peace, both now and in the future?

In the podcast, Molly, Jasleen and Vasko share their memories of the war stories they grew up with, and they reflect on how war and peace were taught in the different school systems (in Greece, Serbia, Australia, Ireland and England) which they were part of. We dive into the poems, speeches and artwork which they have authored themselves, to express their own views on conflicts past, present and future. We discuss what impact children's perspectives can have in helping all of us re-visualise conflict from many different angles. And they explain how empowering it has been to have their voices heard, thanks to Never Such Innocence. Their experiences underline the vital importance of involving children in conversations about war and peace, and we celebrate the amazing work done by Never Such Innocence in bringing young people from all around their world into dialogue with each other and in giving them opportunities to address world leaders in lots of different places, from Buckingham Palace to the Bundestag. 

We hope you enjoy the episode! You can read Molly and Jasleen's poems and see Vasko's artwork in this blog, and you can find out more about Never Such Innocence via their website.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

August is also a Principal at Useful Fiction and an author who explores the future of conflict through “FICINT” [Fictional Intelligence] storytelling. His talks, short stories, and workshops have taken him from speaking at the Nobel Institute in Oslo to lecturing at West Point. August is a non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. From 2014-17 he directed the Council’s Art of Future Warfare Project, which explored creative works for insight into the future of conflict. August is a regular speaker to private sector, academic and US and allied government audiences. He also leads the Strategy team for the Warring With Machines AI ethics project at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo.  With Peter, August is the co-author of the best-seller Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (2015) and Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution (2020).

In the podcast, we discuss traditional methods of visualising future warfare; what 'useful fiction' can contribute in this space; the use of history in future-focused storytelling; and the capacity of stories (one of the oldest tools in the world) to shine a spotlight on blindspots and to raise uncomfortable questions, while engaging a wide range of readers in important conversations about the future.  We dive into Ghost Fleet in particular, and also August's short story ANTFARM.

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Cosplay, and what it can tell us about representations of war and violence, is, not surprisingly, one of the topics that we discuss with Katarina on the show. But that is not all. Among the topics we explore with her, are

–      how (childhood) stories shape our memories of wars, even when those wars happened a long time before we were born

–      how stories in various media and popular culture, including cosplay, reflect and influence ideas about conflict

–      how active involvement in cultural practices such as cosplay is a chance to challenge dominating, often stereotypical narratives of conflict

–      conflict and gender roles, in popular culture, cosplay and beyond

–      the militarisation of popular culture in Norway and Britain

–      cultures of memorialisation: what is remembered and how, and what isn’t, and why

–      boundaries between stories and reality

–      how representations of war and conflict in popular culture might shape our ideas of the future of warfare

We hope you enjoy the episode!
 
 For a version of our podcast with close captions, please go to our YouTube channel. You can find out more about Dr Katarina Birkedal’s work on her website at the Centre for Arts and Politics at the University of St Andrews. Be sure also to check out Katarina’s blog posts on the Visualising War website.

For more information about the Visualising War project, individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Taliesin and Evitel’s YouTube channel has 293 000 subscribers at the time of recording, and their Twitch channel has more than 83 000 followers. Their content has been viewed 69 million times. They have also hosted live events for Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft. More recently, they have expanded their content to include analyses of film and TV as well as commentary on the game Final Fantasy XIV.

You can find them on their YouTube channels – Taliesin & Evitel, T&E Talks, and Taliesin & Evitel TV – on their  Twitch channel, on Twitter, and on their website.

Please note that this episode was recorded before the state of California filed its lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for discrimination against female employees, including charges of sexual misconduct. For more information, please see Taliesin and Evitel's video on the topic: https://youtu.be/zqd1uAtqtTQ

In the episode, we discuss how war is visualised through immersive fantasy in the MMORGP World of Warcraft. We talk about how the game constructs agency and heroism in war, how allegiance and identity is used, how the aftereffects of war are depicted, and how redemption and reconciliation are presented.  Taliesin and Evitel reflect on how the game treats player choice and ethics in extreme situations, including the perpetration of what amounts to in-game war, and whether the game amounts to a commentary on the illusion of free will in warfare, or on how far a person is prepared to go on orders.

We reflect on how the game-world reflects the real-world attitudes of its creators, from the narrative construction of the two main factions – the Alliance and the Horde – as ‘steadfast’ and ‘savage’ respectively, to the treatment of the peoples that constitute them. From this, we discuss how our own experiences inform our readings of the game as players, and whether it is possible for the opposite to occur.  The conversation dives into many fascinating aspects of how we visualise war, in the real world and the game world - and how games and reality inform each other.

We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 
 
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Among other topics, we discuss

–      the possibilities, limitations and challenges of representing war and battle in video games

–      the significance of historical accuracy in video games based on real conflicts

–      the complex interplay of technical, aesthetic, economic and historical interests in the creation of games

–      the ethical aspects of video gaming and player immersion, especially with regard to the representation of violence and injury

–      the risks, challenges and consequences of representing real-life wars, battles and conflicts in games 

–      the role and ethics of player agency

We hope you enjoy the episode!
 
 For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about Dr Iain Donald’s work on his website at Abertay University. For links to some of the games Iain mentions in the podcast, you can read this blog.

For more information about the Visualising War project, individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

He has worked a lot in Latin America, and more recently he has been looking at armed conflict in Ukraine, Myanmar, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, examining the legacies of armed conflict and the strategies which individuals and groups use to coexist in the aftermath of mass violence. Roddy is not just an academic: he has also worked for the United Nations and various NGOs on conflict analysis and conflict transformation. In Guatemala, for example, he was part of the team that prepared the investigation and brought evidence against former de facto president General Rios Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity, which resulted in his conviction in 2013. 

In the podcast, we discuss the language and categories used to define different kinds of political violence, the hierarchies we construct between them, and what difference they make to how perpetrators, victims, international observers and legal processes visualise and respond to conflict. Roddy talks us through the long process of investigating and redefining the political violence that took place in Guatemala from 1975 onwards, which was described by government supporters as 'brave counter-insurgency' but ultimately defined as involving acts of genocide, perpetrated against the Mayan population by the state. He reflects on the ongoing dissonance between how different sectors of Guatemalan society visualise and narrate the past, with implications for their future: different habits of remembering and describing what happened are further polarising an already polarised community. 

This gets us talking about peace and reconciliation processes, with Roddy reflecting on some of the ground-breaking aspects of the 2014 Colombian peace process. Rather than simply involving military actors, this involved civil society and gave victims a seat at the negotiating table. Combatants on both sides heard from a 'universe of victims'. Roddy compares this participatory approach with more 'top-down' peace processes, and we discuss the 'local turn' in sustainable peacebuilding and the 'spaces for encounter' which can engage emotions, break down conflict identities, 'deconstruct' or 'rehumanise' the enemy', overcome mistrust, and help people on all sides envision a more peaceful future. Roddy underlines the blurred line between 'peace' and 'conflict', as we consider the barriers to sustainable peacebuilding. And he talks about a project he is involved in which uses film as a tool to help individuals and communities look critically at their habits of visualising war and peace.

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Alongside her research, Teresa works for the charity In Place of War, which supports artists and cultural organisations in places of conflict all around the world. Her recent work has focused particularly on creative enterprise, community arts education and arts-based social movements in Colombia, and she is co-editor of a volume coming out soon called ‘The Art of Making Something from Nothing’, which looks at the social impact of arts projects across the Global South.

Lydia is closely connected to the Conflict Textiles project which we talked about on the podcast last week, and she has curated a range of exhibitions in connection with this (called ‘Stitched Voices’ and ‘Threads, War and Conflict’), bringing feminist international relations theory and critical peace and conflict studies together. She is passionate about creative and participatory approaches to peace and conflict studies, and her work for the Art of Peace project has focused particularly on grassroots arts projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Azadeh has been leading a research project on the intersection of arts and peace-building in Lebanon, focused particularly on refugee communities from Syria and internally displaced people from within Lebanon itself. She has a particular interest in post-war geographies and narratives of displacement; in how different affected communities present their histories and identities through different artistic media; and how different forms of art can create avenues for peace activism, by helping people work through the complexities of solidarity, responsibility and ethics. 

We hope you enjoy the episode. You can find out more about the Art of Peace project on their website, and more information about In Place of War is available here. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link.

For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In the podcast, we talk about drawing as a dynamic process: one in which the artist invests time, and during which the people being drawn might come and go, shift position or mood, fade into the background or come into focus. George’s drawings capture the rhythm of a place over several hours, enabling him to convey a context and set of experiences that are less easily observed through the fast shutter speed of a camera lens. Another aspect of drawing that George relishes is how approachable and unthreatening an artist often seems. While a cameraman’s equipment might act as a barrier, a simple pad and pencil often gets people coming closer to look and ask questions, sparking conversations. Drawing on location involves listening to many different people and the stories they want to share; and what George hears then finds its way into the drawings as they develop. 

George reflects on the combination of aesthetics and storytelling in his reportage. While he strives to make his art beautiful, he sees little point in an attractive image which is not telling an interesting story – one that uncovers less visible, ignored or forgotten aspects of a conflict. One thing that motivates his work is the desire to round out our habits of visualising contemporary wars. We discuss the push and pull of media organisations and NGOs, who sometimes want an artist to focus on particular aspects of a conflict, and also the challenges that artists and photographers often face in deciding what is appropriate to depict in any given context. George clearly sees his drawings as fulfilling a documentary role, setting down a record for the future; but he is also interested in myth-busting, especially around migration, and his book Drawn Across Borders has been described as ‘a work of art, compassion and activism.’

We hope you enjoy the episode! A blog with some of the images we discuss is available here, and more  images are available on George’s website. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. 

For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In the podcast, Peter talks about what motivated him to go to war as a photographer in the first place, and how his understanding of war and his approach to conflict photography have evolved over time. Aware that a single photograph can only capture one person’s perspective and a tiny slice of time, Peter underlines the importance of a multiplicity of images which together can build a sense of context, change over time and diversity of experience. He tries to document wars as holistically as possible, while still going deep and getting personal. He is particularly interested in unpicking the gap between our habits of imagining, viewing and understanding conflict and how it impacts people for real. There is a strong sense in his books that he is myth-busting, as he invites us to look critically at our own habits of seeing and really stretches our understanding of war’s dynamics, impacts and aftermath. 

Among other things, Peter talks about the aesthetics of conflict photography, the authenticity and 'trustworthiness' of the images he tries to take, and his role as a narrator - both when taking individual photographs and when curating them into photographic collections and books. We discuss the opportunities that long-form books can offer compared with short-form articles, in documenting both multiplicity and complexity. And we consider what written text can add to images, in contextualising and sometimes even dispelling a mirage. Along the way we reflect on the vital role that photography and a reflective press can play in deconstructing misconceptions and idealisations of war that political rhetoric and other social pressures so often rely on.

We hope you enjoy the episode! This blog captures some of the images that Peter talks about; and listeners can see more on Peter's website and instagram page.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

The First Punic War was the first large-scale, overseas war of the Romans and in many ways laid the foundations for Rome’s vast empire. From the beginning, this major conflict prompted authors - many of whom were war veterans themselves, and many displaced to Rome due to conflict - to innovate with their writing. Drawing on present experiences as well as traditional Greek models of writing about war (Homer), they used poetry and drama to conceptualise the nature and impact of this biggest military conflict yet and, in the process, created Latin literature! 

Among other topics, we discuss:

• How engagement with the First Punic War impacted Roman culture and society for centuries to come and led to the beginnings of Latin literature 
• What early Latin literature and literary engagement with war was like 
• How writing about war, and drawing on established Greek literary models to do so, impacted Roman identity and self-definition 
• The interplay between different forms of writing and material culture such as coins and sculptures 
• How generation after generation of Romans engaged with the First Punic War in very different ways and what significance the war had to Romans at different points of their history 
• How engaging with modern narratives of war can enhance our understanding of the ancient world 
• What the ancient world might still have to offer us in our attempts to conceptualise and come to terms with war and conflict in the present

We hope you enjoy the episode! 
 
Tom has put together a blog containing some excerpts of the texts he talks about. You can find out more about his work on his website at the University of St Andrews.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. 

For more information about the Visualising War project, individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young 
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

In the podcast, we discuss the myth-making around different aspects of ancient Greek warfare, and particularly the Greek elite's interest in narrating pitched battles involving tightly-packed hoplite troops. While naval encounters, ambushes and other kinds of engagement got more summary treatment, pitched battles became a literary trope or set-piece of Greek history writing, generating clichés about Greek warfare that did not reflect the much more complex, messier reality. 

We also touch on military training, and debunk the idea that Sparta's system was as focused or thorough as is often supposed. Owen discusses the social conditioning - via storytelling and commemoration practices - that prepared Athenian soldiers to fight. And Roel outlines the tensions between Homeric military ideals (of risk-taking and self-sacrifice) and how Greek generals really needed their soldiers to behave. 

As the conversation goes on, we look at the ways in which generals during the 18th century turned to ancient Greek models to shape their own military practice, reviving or perpetuating the emphasis on decisive pitched battles as the only way to win a war.  We also discuss how narratives and images of ancient Greek warfare have found their way into popular culture, in particular through art, film and gaming. And we reflect on the 'safe distance' which the ancient world can offer as place to explore modern experiences of conflict - whether as a soldier/veteran or civilian. As Owen and Roel explain, the storytelling that has been done about ancient Greek warfare from antiquity to today continues to shape how we visualise many aspects of war, both positively and negatively.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• how easy/difficult is it to reconstruct how people experienced the present during the Second World War, and why try?
• what is 'temporal dislocation' and what are its impacts?
• how did people in different circumstances (e.g. POWs, women on the home front, resistance fighters) respond to temporal disruptions and try to regain some control?
• can we see changes in the ways in which time was narrated (not just experienced), and what can this tell us?
• how might the study of temporal dislocation and people's experiences of the present during WWII help us understand and visualise the impacts of war in general?

We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

Among our guests we welcome back Vikki Hawkins and Kate Clements, the curators of the WWII Galleries; and we also have with us James Bulgin, the content lead for the Holocaust Gallery. They give us exclusive and in-depth insight into the design and aims of the galleries, the planning process, and the spectacular and often poignant objects which visitors are able to see and experience  first hand, many for the very first time, from the UK and all over the world. 

Among other topics, we discuss 

• how our ways of visualising WWII and the Holocaust have changed over the past decades and how those changes are reflected in the design of the galleries 
• what sorts of objects are visible at the galleries and what kinds of stories these objects can tell us 
• wide-spread myths about WWII and the Holocaust which the new galleries seek to challenge 
• the responsibilities involved in visualising such highly sensitive topics as the WWII and the Holocaust, and what effect the stories we tell about these events have had and might have on us 
• the challenges involved in presenting a global conflict in all its diversity, while making ample room for the many personal voices from all over the world to be heard 
• ways to make objects tell those personal stories and prompt us to engage into a dialogue with them and - through them - with each other 
• James’, Vikki’s and Kate’s favourite objects, and 
• how the WWII and Holocaust Galleries fit into the IWM’s representation of war and conflict more broadly 

We hope you enjoy the episode! 
 
Listeners who want to see some of the objects mentioned by Kate and Vikki can read about them in this blog. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please listen here. Also, if you haven't heard it already don't forget to check out the first episode of this two-part mini series, in which we discuss the IWM’s recently redesigned WWI Galleries.

To find out more about the WWI, WWII and Holocaust Galleries, do visit the website of the Imperial War Museum. Also be sure to keep an eye out for the richly illustrated book accompanying the opening of the WWII Gallery and co-authored by our guests Vikki and Kate as well as Paul Cornish, with a foreword by Margaret MacMillan:Total War. A People's History of World War II (Thames&Hudson). James Bulgin has also written a brand new book on the Holocaust, featuring many personal stories and objects - it is available as an audiobook here.

 
For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young 
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

Strategic studies look at how decisions about war (including avoidance of war and concluding them through treaties) are made at the highest political level, and what influence those decisions have on the course of wars and battles. Strategy-making is an act of visualisation in itself; and of course it can be heavily influenced by past habits of visualising war.  We discuss the connection between strategy-making and storytelling, and how descriptions of strategy end up shaping the ways we visualise individual conflicts and war more broadly.  

Among other topics, we talk about: 

• The role of grand strategies in wars from antiquity via WWII to more recent conflicts in the Middle East – do grand strategies win wars? 
• How our understanding of and approaches to grand strategy have changed over time, and how they might develop in the future 
• What shapes generals’ and politicians’ strategic decision-making, including the influence of past war stories in promoting particular 'strategic' mindsets
• Whether you can teach and learn strategy, and the best ways to do that, including war gaming 
• How grand strategy is visualised and narrated, and how it coexists and sometimes competes with other narratives 
• Whether it makes sense to wage wars at all 

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please listen here. You can find out more about Phil O’Brien’s work on his website at the University of St Andrews; also be sure to check out the website of the university’s Institute for the Study of War and Strategy.  

For more information about the Visualising War project, individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young 
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

With us on the show today are Sir Hew Strachan, a world-leading authority on Britain’s military history and WWI in particular, and academic advisor on the 2014 design of the WWI Galleries; James Taylor, Assistant Director Narrative and Content at the Imperial War Museums; and Vicki Hawkins and Kate Clements, curators for the IWM's new WWII galleries. They give us exclusive insight into the planning and processes behind this enormous project of redesigning the galleries, which make thousands of objects come to life, many for the first time.

Among other topics, we discuss

–      the influence of wide-spread myths about WWI, the need to bust those myths and the best ways to do that

–      the collaboration between curators and academic advisors and trustees

–      the history and development of the Imperial War Museum and its approach to narrating past and present conflicts

–      the challenges involved in presenting a global conflict in all its diversity, doing justice to its impact on the home front just as much as to the events and suffering in so many different theatres of war across the world

–      the challenges of making individual, personal voices heard while setting them in their global context

–      the processes of selecting objects and the best ways to narrate their story

–      James, Hew, Vicki and Kate’s favourite objects, and

–      how the work on the WWI galleries has influenced the design of the WWII and Holocaust galleries

We hope you enjoy the episode!
 
For a version of our podcast with close captions, please listen here. To find out more about the IWM's WWI, WWII and Holocaust Galleries, do visit the website of the Imperial War Museum and for more background about modern wars and conflicts, be sure to tune in to James Taylor’s new podcast series, Conflict of Interest.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• how differently is WW1 remembered in New Zealand compared with elsewhere?
• what forms of commemoration or storytelling dominate our habits of visualising WW1?
• what impact did centenary commemorations have on how we view this well-known conflict?
• what different musical responses to WW1 have there been over the last century?
• what challenges and opportunities do composers wrestle with when representing war in music?
• what musical styles did Anthony adopt in his oratorio, Gallipoli to the Somme, and why?
• how might this oratorio change or develop the ways in which we look back on WW1 today?

We hope you enjoy the episode! You can listen to the whole of Anthony's oratorio 'Gallipoli to the Somme' here; it is one of the most moving and thought-provoking representations of the First World War in existence. Kate's latest book, 'Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney', is also a tour de force, and will make you want to dive deeper into Gurney's works; you can purchase it here.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• How and why did concepts of war shift in the Napoleonic era?
• In what sense did war become a 'problem of knowledge', with uncertainty outweighing certainty?
• How did these changes in war itself and the way it was visualised affect how people wrote about it and trends in representation? What new 'poetics of war' emerged? And what media came to dominate?
• In what sense do representations of war like maps and virtual reality games act simulate war itself, enabling readers to immerse themselves rather than just visualising from afar?
• What emotional impact do representations of war in different media have on individuals and communities? And to what use are they put?

Anders' insights into the complex relationship between war, knowledge and narrative touch on issues that go right to the heart of the Visualising War project. We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• what prompted Omar to begin blogging as 'Mosul Eye' in 2014 and what his initial goal was
• what aspects of the occupation and liberation he decided to focus on, and why
• how the people of Mosul, the media and the wider international community responded to Mosul Eye
• what role his blog played in the 'information war' which accompanies conflict in the digital age
• how different live blogging is from writing the history of a conflict with the benefit of hindsight
• what role blogging can play in helping people visualise peace/renewal as well as war

We hope you enjoy the episode! To find out more about Mosul Eye, please visit the website. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• compared with traditional media, what impact can digital media have on how conflicts are reported, represented and understood?
• when peaceful protests turned violent in Syria, what use did people make of digital media and why?
• in what ways can digital media drive (and not just document) conflict?  
• what role might social media providers play in shaping current and future habits of visualising war?
• how did the rise of citizen journalism in Syria turn into a thriving new film industry?
• how can the publication of blogs via online platforms like Syria Untold broaden our habits of visualising war?

We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• is it easier to represent war than peace - or, at least, to represent cliches of war and peace?
• why is there no easily recognised tradition of 'peace photography' as there is for war photography?
• what role does photography play alongside other media (texts, films, works of art, etc) in shaping our habits of visualising war and peace?
• how can efforts to represent or visualise 'pockets' or 'islands' of everyday peace engender more peaceful practices in the wider world? How can we build peace with images?

We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link.

To find out more about Frank's work, you can visit his project website where he invites anyone interested in building peace with images to get involved.  For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• how do wounds help us visualise war itself?
• what 'iconic' wounds do we associate with different wars, and why?
• what wounds remain less visible, or less understood?
• how has the general public responded to war wounds over time, and what has shaped their understanding and attitudes?
• how interconnected is the history of warfare and the history of medicine?
• what difference does it make to visualise war as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? 
• how optimistic should we feel about our ability to keep those Horsemen at bay in future? 

We hope you enjoy the episode!

*Please note: this episode was recorded in spring 2021, before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Some references to Afghanistan are therefore out of date.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• how popular are war documentaries with TV production companies and audiences, and which wars are people most interested in?
• who/what decides which aspects of a conflict a documentary should focus on? (audience expectations, the need to 'entertain', the need for a new 'angle', academic input, etc?)
• what aspects of conflict are less often represented, and why? 
• how have war documentaries changed over time, and what trends might we expect in future?
• what impact do war documentaries have today on our habits of visualising war?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

*Please note: this episode was recorded in spring 2021, before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Some references to Afghanistan are therefore out of date.

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• what inspired the foundation of the IWPR, and how was its mission defined?
• what role can or should journalism play in conflict zones and peace processes?
• what difference does it make to empower marginalised voices during conflicts and periods of transition? And what risks do we face if we do not support voices on the ground to have their say and drive change ?
• how might war and peace reporting change in the coming decades?
• what work will the IWPR be prioritising to meet the challenges of the future and continue supporting war and peace reporting around the world?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link.

You can find out more about the work of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting on their website. As an NGO, they rely on fundraising to keep their important work going; so if you have been inspired by what you have heard, please do consider pressing the red 'donate' button to contribute. 

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• How influential are ancient war stories on modern habits of visualising war?
• What aspects of Achilles' story and character did Ewan want to emphasise, and why?
• How have audiences responded to Ewan's harrowing representation of Achilles' rage and grief?
• Could his deconstruction of the 'hero' Achilles be seen as 'anti war'?
• What impact does he think theatre can have on how we see, question and understand conflict across time?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about Ewan's work and find clips of his plays on the Company of Wolves website.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• What films/war stories shaped their habits of visualising war in the past? 
• What cliches about conflict do stage and screen dramatisations tend to reinforce? And what role can theatre play in challenging those cliches?
• What can ancient war stories bring to modern understandings of war and conflict?
• What connections do they draw between the experiences of Hector and Andromache in the Trojan war and modern conflict/military culture as experienced by Alex and Bea?
• Why did they end up focusing on military spouses/partners, and what does that angle bring to the wider study of war?
• What impact do they hope their new play, Tempus Fugit, will have on military and civilian audiences?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. To find out more about the wider research we have been doing into dramatisations of war on stage and screen, you can read this blog.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• Does Ancient Warfare Magazine foreground some aspects of war more than others? What aspects does it cover less often, and why?
• How do the editors balance readers' expectations and habits of visualising ancient warfare with what their authors want to communicate and new advances in research?
• What role do illustrations play alongside textual descriptions in bringing ancient warfare to life for modern readers? And how much creative interpretation goes into the magazine's artistic reconstructions of ancient warfare?
• What factors influence modern reconstructions or visualisations of ancient warfare?
• What challenges and responsibilities does the magazine industry/popular press have to think about when representing ancient warfare in the 21st century?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. If you want to find out more about Ancient Warfare Magazine, you can look up their latest issues here and listen to their podcast here.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

Robert the Bruce is famous for many reasons, but particularly for leading the First War of Scottish Independence; so Jill, James and Jim quickly began wrestling with how to represent war and violence in art and text, with a young readership in mind. In the podcast, we discuss the decisions they took about how to represent iconic battles and acts of cruelty that today might count as war crimes. We talk about the layers that art can add to text, and vice versa; their memories of begin fascinated as well as horrified by the war stories they came across as children; how young readers can blur but also distinguish between fact and fiction; and the role that historical war stories can play in prompting young people to ask important questions about modern conflicts and war in general. 

Among other questions, Alice asked:

• How has the representation of war in children’s books changed over time?
• When telling the story of Robert the Bruce, which aspects of battle and war did Jill, James and Jim particularly want to highlight?
• Were there some aspects of war/violence which they opted not to represent?
• How have children responded to the book's depiction of medieval warfare?
• What responsibilities do children's publishers, authors and illustrators have when depicting war for young people in the 21st century?
• How might the representation of war in children's literature change over the next few decades?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. If you want to find out more about our conversation, you can read these two blogs here and here.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

• What does the study of war writing bring to wider studies of war and conflict? 
• How do age-old war stories continue to influence war writing and the experience of war today? 
• What challenges do war writers face when trying to convey the complexities of war?  
• What do readers/audiences tend to expect of war writing, and why? 
• Have some genres of war writing been more dominated by male or female voices, and has that changed over time? 
• What groups of people or conflict experiences have often been marginalised by traditions of war writing? 
• How has the literary representation of veterans changed over time? 
• What can the study of silence bring to our understanding and appreciation of war stories?  

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about Kate's research here.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.  

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

Aggie Hirst, Senior Lecturer, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Dr Aggie Hirst’s work focuses on international political theory and critical military studies. She is currently Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Trust and British Academy funded research project exploring the US military’s use of wargames and simulations. 

Alice König, Senior Lecturer and co-lead of the ‘Visualising War’-project, University of St Andrews

Dr Alice König’s research is centred on intertextuality and socio-literary interactions, attitudes to and the transmission of expertise, science, and war. Currently, her focus is on the Visualising War Project, exploring how war narratives interact and form throughout history. Find Alice @KonigAlice

Aristidis A. Foley, PhD Candidate, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews

Aris Foley’s research combines political and critical theories with dystopian literature, exploring the notion of Critical Dystopianism. He is an avid painter of wargame models, a hobby which has engaged him for 18 years. Find Aris @ares_miniatures

Katarina H.S. Birkedal, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Classics, University of St Andrews

Dr Katarina Birkedal’s work focuses on the politics of storytelling. Her research centres an embrace of interdisciplinarity and multiplicity, of voices and approaches. She is currently working on bridging disciplinary silos to further our understanding of war stories and their social and cultural impact. Find Katarina @Kat_in_a_Birch

As the second in a two-part special, this episode will delve into the cultural impact of wargames in history and shed light on their contemporary influence in discourses on war and strategy.

For more information check out the Visualising Strategy blog.

To find out more about our research programme, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War project website.


Co-produced by Katarina Birkedal and Sneha Reddy
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin 

James Fielder, Founder, Liminal Operations and Adjunct Professor, Colorado State University

Dr James "Pigeon" Fielder teaches political science at Colorado State University, where he researches emergent political processes through tabletop, live-action, and digital gaming. He founded the corporate wargame consultancy Liminal Operations and writes for Evil Beagle Games. Find Pigeon at @j_d_fielder

Paul Vebber, Assistant Director, Wargaming and Future Warfare Research, US Navy

Paul Vebber is a lifelong hobby wargamer and co-founder of Matrix Games. He currently works for the US Navy as a civilian focused on wargaming in support of technology development and associated employment concepts.

Yuna Huh Wong, Defense Analyst, Institute for Defense Analyses

Dr Yuna Huh Wong is a defense analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. At IDA she is currently involved in cyber wargames; as well as tabletop exercises and studies to support the Joint Staff. Find Yuna @YunaHuhWong

Felipe Cruvinel, PhD Candidate, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews

Felipe Cruvinel is a PhD candidate at St Andrews, currently writing a thesis on applying data analysis to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. He designs and produces wargames and simulations for the school and undertakes tabletop design and hobby gaming in his own time. Find Felipe @FCruvi 

As the first in a two-part special, this episode will provide a peek into the contemporary world of crisis simulations and wargames and the intriguing processes, inspiration, and decisions that underlie their creation and production.


For more information check out the Visualising Strategy blog.

To find out more about our research programme, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Co-produced by Katarina Birkedal and Sneha Reddy
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Music composed by Jonathan Young
   Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• What was he trying to communicate with his play Our Boys about war and soldiering? 
• What aspects of war and soldiering was he particularly keen to highlight in his play Soldier On?
• How can theatre help explain PTSD and other challenges that soldiers/veterans face to a wider public?
• What role can storytelling - and especially drama and acting - play in helping people process trauma themselves?
• What role do historic stories and archetypes play in helping society wrestle with the ethics and impacts of war?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link.  For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• How does writing compare with, e.g., painting as a narrative medium when it comes to representing war?
• To what extent does Anatomy of a Soldier reflect his own experiences of war and injury, and why did he decide to write fiction rather than autobiography?
• Why did he decide to narrate the story through a series of inanimate objects and not a human character?
• How does the novel's rapid changes of perspectives and jumping backwards-and-forwards in time contribute to its depiction of war?
• What does he want the novel to communicate to readers about soldiering, combat and war?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about Harry's writing and artwork by visiting his website. 

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• What can dance as a form of storytelling bring to representations of war?
• How did her experience of embedding with an infantry battalion shape her understanding of soldiering and combat, and how did it influence the way she decided to represent war on stage?
• Why did she decide to focus attention on the human body, as the frontline of military conflict?
• What did she want to communicate to audiences about the emotional side of soldiering?
• What does 5 Soldiers reveal about gender dynamics in the military?
• How have audiences reacted, and how might watching 5 Soldiers influence people's habits of visualising war? 

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about 5 Soldiers, an expanded version of the show called 10 Soldiers, and the Rosie Kay Dance Company on their website. A recorded performance of 5 Soldiers can be viewed here.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• What difference can research into local culture and history make to military operations?
• How did Western/official narratives of the war in Afghanistan compare with the conflict/conflicts that were actually taking place on the ground?
• In what ways can official/external habits of understanding or describing a conflict end up shaping the course that the conflict ultimately takes?
• What role do war stories play in driving humans to fight, or in justifying their decisions to go to war?
• What social narratives do we need to foster and tell to reduce the drivers of conflict in the 21st century?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about Mike's research and publications on his website, and his books can be purchased from all good booksellers! For a 25% discount on Why We Fight, go to Hurst Publishers and use the code WARFIGHT25.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• What role can museums play (compared with news outlets, school curricula, historical documentaries, etc) in deepening public understanding of conflict?
• What different aspects of war do the different Imperial War Museums highlight?
• How has the focus of the Imperial War Museums' exhibitions changed over time? 
• How does the Institute use history to contextualise and help people understand contemporary conflicts?
• What role do the Imperial War Museums hope to play in the future, in shaping understanding of 21st century conflict?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about the Imperial War Museums Institute here.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

The artwork they have produced has been curated into an exhibition entitled ‘Of Ordinary Things’. Representations of conflict often focus on fighting, destruction, loss and death. The pieces in this exhibition are different: they aim to capture the everyday, the lives that people try to live in the shadow of conflict, and above all how women experience war. In this podcast Rana talks about the role that art can play in processing and preserving memories, both good and bad. She also talks about the importance of de-centring the fighting in our visualisations of war and foregrounding ordinary people's experiences of living in a war zone, both to capture the bigger picture and to remind people that the impacts of conflict continue long after troops have withdrawn.

Among other questions, we asked Rana: 

• what inspired her to set up the Iraqi Women, Art and War Group
• what kinds of stories the women in this group want to tell about war
• why she and her fellow artists want to foreground the everyday 'ordinary things' of life in a war zone, and women's experiences in particular
• how the artwork that they have produced might shift our habits of visualising the Iraq War in particular and war more generally

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. If you would like to see the images discussed in this podcast, you can find bonus material on our project blog.  You can view more of Rana's artwork and some short films about the Iraqi Women, Art and War Group  at www.iwaw19.com.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• how accurately does Trajan's column represent the Dacian Wars?
• what earlier representations of war influenced the carvings on the column?
• whose vision of war do we see depicted on it?
• who was the column meant to impress?
• what impact did Trajan's column have at the time, and what influence has it had since on how people imagine, understand and even prosecute military campaigns?
• what can Trajan's column tell us about Roman and later habits of visualising war?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. If you would like to see the images discussed in this podcast, you can find bonus material on our project blog.  You can also find out more about Trajan's column on Jon's  website.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• what drew him to conflict photography in the first place, and what styles of conflict photography have inspired him in the past
• what media outlets and their viewers want or expect from conflict photography
• why NGOs and aid organisations increasing engage photojournalists to document conflict, and what kinds of images they want to capture
• what Hugh himself is trying to capture and communicate in the creative and sensitive images of conflict that he produces
• what social and political impact conflict photography can have

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. If you would like to see the images discussed in this podcast, you can find bonus material on our project blog.  You can also follow Hugh on Instagram and find out more about his work on his website.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• What kinds of war art have inspired her in the past and what kinds of war art does she try to avoid?
• How does she choose her subject matter, and why does she focus on ordinary people's day-to-day experiences of conflict?
• Why does she make her war art look so beautiful?
• What wider messages about war is she trying to communicate with her art?
• What impact does she think art can have on a community's habits of thinking about war?

We hope you enjoy the episode!

For a version of our podcast with close captions, please visit https://youtu.be/Rh1iM4zpk9Y. If you would like to see the images discussed in this podcast, you can find bonus material on our project blog.  To follow Diana, and find out more about her upcoming exhibitions, please have a look on her website.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

• Why is it important to give children a voice on conflict?
• How do children in different parts of the world define and understand conflict?
• What aspects of conflict do children and young people tend to highlight? 
• Do they communicate different things in art compared with song, or poetry compared with speech writing?
• What kinds of audience can they reach?
• What can adults learn from children about conflict?

If you would like to see the images or read the full poems discussed in this podcast episode, you can find bonus material on our project blog.  For a version of our podcast with close captions, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85kTUV6BqUU. To get in touch with the Never Such Innocence project or find out more about their past work and upcoming aims, please have a look on their website.

For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin