• 
• 
• 
  • Forthcoming
  • Recent
• 
• 
• 

48 Charles Street,
London W1J 5EN
info@strategicdialogue.org Tel: +44 (0) 20 7493 9333
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7493 4909

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in War Studies

Jay Winter

29 February - 15 March 2012
University of Cambridge

Jay Winter served as Humanitas Visiting Professor in War Studies 2012. Professor Winter (Charles J Stille Professor of History, Yale University) gave a series of three public lectures on the textual and visual representation of war in cultural fields.  The lectures explored the languages and symbolic forms which writers, artists, and filmmakers have used to represent war since 1900. 

The first lecture made the claim that whatever language one uses, one speaks differently of war. English and French were taken as points of reference, but Professor Winter contended that those proficient in other languages can easily test this hypothesis. He claimed that humans have as many languages of war as  languages through which they speak to each other. They are neither interchangeable nor equivalent.  Each brings its history, its music, and its memory of the past with it. The second lecture addressed painting and sculpture, in an effort to show that figuring war has the capacity to reduce and, at times, leap over some of these language barriers. The third lecture addressed a central problem in the framing of war in film; how to determine how filmmakers have chosen between  spectacular and indirect approaches to making war films. Both have been mainstays of the industry since its foundation, which was just in  time for the arrival of industrialised, assembly-line violence in 1914. Professor Winter argued that the genre of war films has a history which always runs up against the immovable limit of the art: that every attempt to film war fails. 

In a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, Professor Winter was joined by impressive speakers from the worlds of academia, military and journalism, who offered different perspectives on the main theme. The panel included Dr Alexander Etkind (Department of Slavonic Studies, Cambridge), Taylor Downing (Managing Director and Head of History, Flashback Television), Lt. Gen. Andrew Graham (former Director, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom), Sir Max Hastings (Author, journalist and broadcaster), Dr Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London) and Professor Meike Wulf (University of Maastricht).

To view videos of Professor Winter's lectures, visit ISD's YouTube channel. To view images from the series, visit ISD's Flickr stream. To view the poster for the series, click here.

The Humanitas Chair in War Studies has been made possible by the generous support of Sir Ronald Grierson.