War and Representation

Professor Nil Santiáñez discusses absolute war, total war, and the literature of WWII with Anders Engberg-Pedersen. In this conversation Professor Nil Santiáñez discusses absolute war, total war, and the literature of WWII with Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Professor of Comparative Literature, Syddansk Universitet.

Professor Santanu Das discusses the complexity of commemoration, the messiness of history and the role of scholarly emotion with Kate McLoughlin.

In this episode associate professor Patrick Deer discusses his forthcoming book We Are All Embedded: Understanding America’s War Culture since 9/11. This book explores contemporary US war culture and focuses in particular on literature, film and media from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Patrick Deer has previously published a number of articles related to this subject: “Mapping Contemporary American War Culture” (College Literature, Winter 2016), “Beyond Recovery: Representing History and Memory in Iraq War” (Modern Fiction Studies, Summer 2017) “Black Lives Matter in Wartime” (RSA Journal, Rome, Italy, Oct. 2018), “‘Despicable Beauty’: the Embedded Sublime and Ethical Hesitation in Iraq War Reportage” (forthcoming in Textual Practice) “The Iraq War” (forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma). The interviewee Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University and co-organizer of NYU’s Cultures of War and the Postwar research collaborative. The interviewer Christine Strandmose Toft is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. Topic Keywords:

Will War still need us? What Future for Agency in War? - an interview with Christopher Coker Professor Christopher Coker discusses why humans are likely to retain control and agency in future wars, even as machines become increasingly autonomous and capable of making decisions that affect life and death. Solveig Gade, the interviewer, is Professor in Performing Arts at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics.  

Professor Joseph Vogl discusses the phenomenon of ‘amok’ with Anders Engberg-Pedersen. Professor Joseph Vogl discusses the phenomenon of ‘amok’ and the relation between mass shootings, warfare, and new forms of governmental power in American postwar society. Joseph Vogl is Professor of Literature, Culture, and Media at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin and Permanent Visiting Professor in the Department of German at Princeton University. Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark.

Professor Scarry and Jens Bjering discuss philosophy and nuclear war. Professor Scarry discusses how the prerogative of the United States executive to order a nuclear attack upsets not only traditional checks on the waging of war, but has severely upended U.S. democracy and constitutionality in toto. Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Jens Bjering is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark .

Professor Vivienne Jabri discusses the relationship between war, aesthetics and politics in relation to contemporary warfare with Christine Strandmose Toft. In this episode Professor Vivienne Jabri discusses the relationship between war, aesthetics and politics in relation to contemporary warfare, and she argues that the tendency to represent war and violence as exceptional and spectacular doesn’t help us understand what war as an everyday phenomenon entails. Vivienne Jabri is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Christine Strandmose Toft is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark.