Teaching

Various teaching projects are being developed in connection with the Visualising War research project, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. For more information about our pedagogic research, please see our Teaching Ancient War and Peace pages.

VISUALISING PEACE: From 2022-2024, Prof. Alice König ran a ‘Vertically Integrated Project‘ (VIP), available to all undergraduate students at St Andrews, on ‘Visualising Peace‘. This VIP enabled students to work together as a team on a series of research outputs while gaining credits for their degree. Key research questions include:

  • What recurring stories do individuals and communities tell about peace/conflict resolution in art, text, film, photography, news reports, museums, music etc?
  • What makes any given narrative (in art, text, music etc) identifiable as a ‘peace story’? And are narratives of peace inevitably constructed in relation to narratives of conflict?
  • What attention do different academic disciplines pay to narratives of peace/conflict resolution, and what could be gained from more interdisciplinary collaboration?
  • What role can narratives of peace play in peacebuilding?

Among other outputs, students created The Visualising Peace Library, which promotes interdisciplinary approaches to peace studies; and a virtual Museum of Peace, designed to generate more conversation about how peace and peace-making are understood and narrated. Students have also been researching how war and peace are taught in different school-level subjects (you can read some preliminary findings here and here); and a small team is currently developing a pilot school-based workshop that will trial some innovative approaches to peace education. This work connects to our research into children’s voices on war and peace and to our research project in Teaching Ancient War and Peace.

VISUALISING WAR AND PEACE IN ANTIQUITY: Alice König runs an Honours module (CL4472) on Visualising Ancient War and Peace. She also teaches a module focused on Roman Civil War Writing (LT4229). You can read some students’ outputs below:

PhD SUPERVISION: We welcome enquiries from PhD applicants interested in the representation of war, its aftermath, conflict resolution and peace-building. We have capacity to supervise students working on material in a wide range of media, and from a wide range of periods and places.

In 2019, we were awarded PhD funding via a World-Leading Scholarship for a project entitled ‘Death’s Grey Land’? A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Death in Battle in Graeco-Roman Literature and Culture. This PhD scholarship was awarded through a competitive selection process, with the successful candidate beginning in May 2021.