In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Beryl Pong, an expert on 20th-century and contemporary war. Beryl is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence. An affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of English, her research is very interdisciplinary, combining literary and historical studies with visual politics and an interest in emerging technologies. Her first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: for the Duration (published in 2020 by Oxford University Press) brings together her research on wartime literature, film and art and looks specifically at how people articulated and navigated temporal anxieties in the context of WWII. Beryl's interest in space and time, and in literary, sound and visual cultures, is also key to her current research on drone warfare. In 2024 she co-edited a book on Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology; and she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture at Cambridge, which explores how drones are impacting the way we see and relate to our world.

The episode starts by diving into some WWII literature to explore the concept of chronophobia: a dread of both past and future, coloured by the in-between-ness of a long period of conflict that followed on from the First World War and led into the Cold War. As Beryl explains, anxieties about past and future are common to many wartime experiences, but they take on some specific resonances during WWII. Along the way, we also explore 'micro temporalities' during wartime, such as the anxiety that builds during a day about what night-time air raids might bring.

We move from discussing 20th-century 'war in the skies' to discussion of the impact that drone technologies are having on how we visualise war itself, as well as how people in conflict zones get viewed. As Beryl underlines, drones promote habits of viewing that are often top-down, imperial and securitising, with a host of real-world consequences for different people on the ground. We discuss the importance of countering this with more bottom-up ways of looking at contemporary wartime experiences, and this leads to some conversation about the roles that art can play in showing us war from new perspectives. This podcast connects to conversations in previous episodes with Julian Wright, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox and Paul Lushenko and Jerilyn Packer. We hope you enjoy the discussion.

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 Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode of the Visualising War and Peace podcast, guest-host Zofia Guertin speaks with Dr. Alice König about her work expanding the Visualising War project to include peace studies. In this conversation, Alice unveils the groundbreaking Ancient Peace Studies Network—the first of its kind dedicated to examining how peace was understood, experienced, and represented across different ancient cultures.

Discover why peace narratives have received far less scholarly attention than war stories, and how Dr. König's team is working to change that by investigating whose voices and experiences are reflected in ancient accounts of peace and reconciliation.

What can ancient approaches to conflict resolution teach us about modern peacebuilding? In this thought-provoking special episode, we explore how elite-centered peace narratives shaped societal attitudes in antiquity and continue to influence our understanding of peace today. Dr. König reveals how her interdisciplinary network is "reading against the grain" of ancient sources to uncover ordinary people's lived experiences of peace—voices that have been historically marginalized but might offer valuable insights for contemporary peace literacy.

Don't miss our conversation about bridging academic research with creative outreach, as Dr. König shares details about the network's collaboration with a professional theater company, NMT Automatics, and the upcoming multi-authored publication, "New Visions of Ancient Peace." This episode offers a perfect blend of historical scholarship and practical application, demonstrating how ancient wisdom might help us visualize and build more effective paths to peace in our modern world.

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 Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, Zofia Guertin interviews Alice König about her recent research on ancient habits of visualising war and peace.

Alice has recently co-edited a new book with Nicolas Wiater, on ancient conflict narratives, called Visualising War across the Ancient Mediterranean: Interplay between Conflict Narratives in Different Genres and Media (Routledge 2025). In this podcast episode, Alice introduces the book and discusses some of the themes at the heart of it.

In particular, she explores the conception of visualisation: the ways in which narratives of war not only reflect or depict conflict but also envision it, in ways that shape how conflict gets pursued or prevented in the real world. She also discusses the role that interplay between narratives and discourses can play in cementing and amplifying influential war imaginaries. And she considers the impacts which all of this war-storytelling has on ordinary lives in the everyday.

In the process, Alice reflects on connections between ancient habits of visualising and narrating war and modern discourses and behaviours. Among other topics, she wonders why narratives of peril and danger seem more attractive than narratives of peace; what consequences might flow from ancient tendencies to euphemise or romanticise violence towards women; and what force military metaphors have in civilian contexts, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The episode ranges back and forth between antiquity and modernity, as Alice discusses militarism(s), the narrative role of children in war storytelling, the complex relationship between discourses of war, knowledge and power, and many other such topics.

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 Visualising Peace Project.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin