Visualising War and Peace

The University of St Andrews
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How do war stories work? And what do they do to us? Join University of St Andrews historian Alice König and colleagues as they explore how war and peace get presented in art, text, film and music. With the help of expert guests, they unpick conflict stories from all sorts of different periods and places. And they ask how the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of peace and war influence us as individuals and shape the societies we live in.

  1. 4d ago

    Long After the Labyrinth - a peace play

    In this episode, Alice interviews theatre makers Jennie Dunne and Jonathan D'Young about their new play, Long After the Labyrinth, which draws on ancient myth to explore post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding today. As the episode explains, the Ancient Peace Studies Network at the University of St Andrews has teamed up with theatre company NMT Automatics to create an epic new play inspired by the myth of the Minotaur and the true tale of the lost Jews of Crete. A gripping narrative told via text, movement and shadow-play, we follow the life of Rena Depas as she embarks upon a labyrinthine quest to find peace in the wake of conflict. While hiding from Nazi soldiers who are rounding up everyone in her community, Rena hides in an ancient olive tree and tumbles into the famous labyrinth of Knossos where she encounters the Minotaur. The labyrinth becomes a liminal space where she begins to process feelings of loss, grief and anger – and where the audience can explore different dimensions of post-conflict transition and peacebuilding. Will Rena be able to keep the Minotaur at bay, and what will that take? Join us on a journey of peace-seeking and peace-making, ancient and modern. For this production, NMT Automatics have brought together a special team of creatives, who have worked with some of the most internationally renowned contemporary theatre companies, including: 1927, Gecko, Theatre Re, Ephemeral Ensemble, Barefaced Greek and Les Enfants Terribles. Produced by NMT Automatics, Chromolume, and the Ancient Peace Studies Network and supported by Arts Council England, The Society for Classical Studies, East London & Essex Liberal Synagogue, JW3, Etz Hayyim Synagogue, Crete, and the University of St Andrews. Alongside the performances, we will be holding a series of peace storytelling workshops, aimed at writers and performers and anyone interested in telling more peace stories: https://apsn.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2026/09/19/peace-storytelling-workshops/. Upstairs At The Gatehouse Highgate Village, London N6 4BD Dates: Wednesday 21st October – Sunday 8th November 2026 Times: Tuesday – Saturday 7:30pm; Sunday 3:00pm No performance on Sunday 25th October Tickets available HERE  The Byre Theatre, St Andrews, Thursday 12th November 2026 Followed by a post-show Q&A with Prof. Alice König  Performing Peace Workshop on the 13th of November led by Prof. Alice König & NMTA.  Tickets available HERE Manchester Jewish Museum, Saturday 28th November 2026  Followed by a post-show Q&A with Prof. Alice König Performing Peace Workshop on the 29th of November led by Prof. Alice König & NMTA. Tickets available HERE  JW3, London, Tuesday 26th January 2027 Wheelchair-accessible performance  Performing Peace Workshop on the evening of 19th of January led by Prof. Alice König & NMTA.   APGRD, University of Oxford, Tuesday 19th January 2027 Afternoon seminar and performance of selected scenes, followed by a discussion with the performers and Prof. Alice König. For further details contact vispeace@st-andrews.ac.uk Tune in to find out more! 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

  2. Oct 4

    Hybrid peace in ancient Mesopotamia - what omens can tell us

    In this episode Alice interviews Dr Seth Richardson, who is based at the University of Chicago and Managing Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Seth’s research focuses on ancient Mesopotamia, and ranges widely over political and economic history, theories of state sovereignty, legitimacy, rebellion and insurgency, and all kinds of violence from war to non-state and community-level violence. He has published many articles and co-authored several books, including – most recently – ‘Monarchies and the Organization of Power: Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Compared, published by CUP in 2025. Seth is also a member of the  Ancient Peace Studies Network, based at the University of St Andrews, and he has been bringing his expertise on ancient Mesopotamia to our project, helping to uncover aspects of ancient peace history which have not been excavated in much depth until now.  This episode focuses particularly on what ancient Mesopotamian omens can tell us about how war, peace and everything between were understood and experienced from the ground up. Seth contrasts what elite-focused sources tell us about military ambition and imperial conquest with the more complex story painted by thousands of cuneiform tablets that shed light on everyday concerns. As he explains, banditry, civil unrest, environmental crises and disease seemed to loom much larger than major armed conflicts. In fact, the omens suggest that many in ancient Mesopotamia lived in a state of recurring insecurity - what Seth refers to as 'hybrid peace'. Together, we discuss how excavating a 'people's history' of ancient peace can significantly change how we visualise antiquity.  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

  3. Sep 7

    Visualising Troy beyond the warfighting

    In this episode Alice interviews Dr Stephan Blum, a Research Associate at the Institute for Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology, at the University of Tübingen. Stephan is a member of the Troy Project, a long-running archaeological collaboration between the universities of Cincinnati and Tübingen, designed to shed more light on the physical remains and social history of one of the ancient world’s most evocative places. Stephan is also a member of the Ancient Peace Studies Network, based at the University of St Andrews, and he has been bringing his expertise in ethnoarchaeology to the project, helping to uncover aspects of ancient peace history which have not been excavated in much depth until now. Troy is famous for the ten-year siege which Homer wrote about in The Iliad and The Odyssey - but this is only a fraction of the city's 3000-year old story. In this episode, we discuss how Homer's famous war stories have distorted our vision of ancient Troy and we consider what we can learn from its wider history. Stephan explains the challenges of looking for peace in the archaeological record, but he also underlines how much evidence we can find at Troy of conflict prevention, conflict resilience and post-conflict transformation. The result is a very different picture of a place that is almost synonymous with war in popular culture. Contextualising Troy's war-torn reputation by excavating more of its peace history teaches us a lot about the dominance of conflict narratives as well as the value of looking for evidence of local, everyday and personal peace across antiquity. 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. You can read more about Stephan's work on Rethinking Troy here. Music composed by Jonathan Young Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

  4. Mar 15

    Speculative Fiction: NATO 2099

    In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Florence Gaub, Director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense College in Rome. A security expert and futurist, she has held key positions such as deputy director at the EU Institute for Security Studies, foresight advisor at the EU Council, and special advisor to EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. Beginning her career at NATO’s Middle East Faculty in 2009, Florence now focuses on strategic foresight and geopolitical trends. Her publications include the bestseller Zukunft: Eine Bedienungsanleitung (2023 – soon to be published in English as Future: A Manual), the EU’s Global Trends to 2030 (2019), and The Cauldron: NATO’s Libya Operation (2018). Florence serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Complex Risks and is a member of the World Science Fiction Society; and last year, she published a graphic novel, NATO 2099, which we discuss in this episode. To get us started, Florence outlines the work of the Research Division at the NATO Defence College, and we discuss the challenges of looking beyond known and predictable futures. We reflect on the fast pace of change across many domains today, and our collective experience of 'future shock' as we grapple with many different kinds of uncertainty and transition at one time. Florence discusses some of the ways in which war in particular is being transformed, pointing to cognitive warfare, biological warfare and grey war, where distinctions between military and civilian spheres of action become blurred.  This leads us to consider the tools we can cultivate to predict the unpredictable. We chat about the power of boredom in prompting us to pay attention to 'weak signals' and the role of imagination in visualising future scenarios. Florence stresses the importance of creative methods, both to foster and to communicate futures thinking. She discusses some of her own initiatives in this space, such as the creation of 'newspapers from the future'; and we delve deep into her graphic novel NATO 2099, which transports readers to a world that our children and grandchildren might inhabit, prompting us to reflect on both technological and human methods of prediction.  We hope you enjoy the episode! If you do, you might want to check out a couple of episodes from our archive which also explore speculative and useful fiction. 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

  5. Mar 8

    Ancient Warfare on Film

    In this episode, Alice interviews Professor Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, based at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and Professor Lee Brice, from Western Illinois University.  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

  6. Feb 9

    Peace and Peacebuilding in ancient Persia

    In this episode, Alice interviews two academics who are part of the newly-founded Ancient Peace Studies Network: Professor John Hyland and Dr Rhyne King.  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

  7. Jan 12

    Bearing witness to women's war trauma in ancient Greek tragedy

    In this podcast, Alice interviews Dr Erika Weiberg, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and Theater Studies at Duke University.  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

  8. 12/18/2025

    Peace and Peacemaking in ancient Greece and Rome

    This episode dives deep into ancient peace history, as Alice interviews Professor Polly Low, from Durham University, and Dr Hannah Cornwell, from the University of Birmingham.  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

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How do war stories work? And what do they do to us? Join University of St Andrews historian Alice König and colleagues as they explore how war and peace get presented in art, text, film and music. With the help of expert guests, they unpick conflict stories from all sorts of different periods and places. And they ask how the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of peace and war influence us as individuals and shape the societies we live in.

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  • Creator
    The University of St Andrews
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    97
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Visualising War and Peace
  • Show Website
    Visualising War and Peace