People have been narrating and representing war and its aftermath ever since humans first came into contact (and conflict) with each other. War-storytelling is a recurring feature of historiography, poetry, oratory, drama and technical writing, among other kinds of text; and conflict narratives also recur in many non-literary forms of representation such as sculpture, cartoons, epitaphs, music and anecdote. In the tales they tell and the tropes they share, they bring different cultures and communities into dialogue with each other. They also connect different contexts and periods: later depictions of war and its impacts invariably respond to the earlier models on which they draw.
In fact, a key premise of our project is that individual conflict narratives have always been constructed in dynamic relation to each other, and that a proper understanding of war-storytelling as a complex cultural phenomenon requires interaction between different genres, media, historical periods and communities to be placed at the heart of discussions. Our goal is to explore these interconnections, while developing new methodologies for ‘reading’ multimedial, cross-cultural and diachronic interplay.
Our other innovative contribution to the study of war-storytelling is to theorise ‘visualisation’ as more than mere representation. We explore it instead as a dynamic, creative process, which not only helps us to ‘picture’ conflict but also generates understandings and expectations that inform the world(s) we inhabit, ‘envisioning’ new realities into being. In brief, visualising war involves much more than looking at or representing it: visualisations of war, whether realistic or fantastical, not only reflect but also inform and continually reshape how we understand, plan for, experience and pursue armed conflict, with real-world ramifications.
Our members conceptualise war broadly: not as a series of battles within a well-defined temporal framework (from declaration of hostilities to ceasefire or peace treaty) but as a much wider set of experiences, impacting a very wide range of people – civilians as well as soldiers – directly and indirectly. Since 2022, we have broadened our focus to encompass narratives of conflict resolution, war’s aftermath, post-conflict recovery, and peacebuilding. For more information on this side of our project, please visit our Visualising Peace site.
Visualising War brings together experts from a range of academic fields, covering multiple historical periods (from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, through Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, to the 20th century and the present day). The conversations that emerge between experts in oral, literary, documentary, technical and material culture enable us to examine a wide array of different ‘visualising’ methodologies, and to explore the complex dynamics of intertextual war-storytelling over the long durée, with implications not only for our understanding of past conflict narratives but also for the study of future war-storytelling.
The representation of war is as powerful a social, cultural and political phenomenon now as it was when ancient Greek poets first began to narrate the sack of Troy. In taking a deliberately long view, we aim to come to a fuller understanding of the ongoing evolution of conflict narratives, the powerful ideologies which they generate through their interactions, and their impact on real-world mindsets, actions and decision-making. In that respect, our project looks forward as well as back; we hope that broad engagement with the results of our research will lead to an enhanced awareness of the mechanisms and impacts of conflict narratives in all eras, and prompt more critical reflection on future as well as contemporary visualisations of war.
You can find out more about the people involved in our research group here. We discuss our work in more detail in our collection of blogs and in the Visualising War and Peace podcast.