Our first major publication is an edited volume of specially commissioned chapters, entitled Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay between Conflict Narratives in Different Media and Genres (eds. A. König and N. Wiater, Routledge 2025). Each chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the ways in which interactions between a wide array of conflict narratives (including written texts, art, sculpture and drawings) result in culturally specific ways of visualising war, especially battle. The volume covers a large range of genres from a variety of ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, Persian, Jewish and Christian, and its innovative focus on interplay offers novel insights into how modes of visualising war compare across time and space, as well as across different kinds of text. Covering material from the third Millennium BCE to the present, it also sheds new light on how different ways of visualising conflict have evolved over the centuries and continue to inform habits of visualising war today. A detailed methodological introduction lays the foundation for future studies of conflict narratives, and the volume’s envoi sets agenda for new research on visualising peace.

Dr Alice König is currently editing an innovative, multi-media publication to build on the successful Visualising War podcast. Its goals are threefold: (1) to deepen understanding of how different media have shaped our habits of visualising war in the past and how they might continue to do so in the future; (2) to encourage those who study conflict, security and peace-building to pay more attention to narratives of war as having critical influences on how war and peace are viewed and pursued; and (3) to promote more dialogue between different kinds of experts, academic and non-academic, by bringing together insights from both theory and practice. Each chapter focuses on a case study from a different medium (e.g. the visual arts, theatre, music, conflict photography), with practitioners (i.e. novelists, composers, theatre-makers, museum curators, etc) discussing their practice alongside scholarly analysis of wider trends in their medium. This expert input from practitioners with direct experience of representing war in their respective fields will significantly enhance our wider discussion and understanding of how war stories work and what they do to us. Academic input will broaden each chapter’s reflections, contextualising individual case studies and drawing connections between the dynamics of different media.

Project members are also engaged in separate research and publication projects of their own which feed into the Visualising War research project.