In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Florence Gaub, Director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense College in Rome. A security expert and futurist, she has held key positions such as deputy director at the EU Institute for Security Studies, foresight advisor at the EU Council, and special advisor to EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. Beginning her career at NATO’s Middle East Faculty in 2009, Florence now focuses on strategic foresight and geopolitical trends. Her publications include the bestseller Zukunft: Eine Bedienungsanleitung (2023 – soon to be published in English as Future: A Manual), the EU’s Global Trends to 2030 (2019), and The Cauldron: NATO’s Libya Operation (2018). Florence serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Complex Risks and is a member of the World Science Fiction Society; and last year, she published a graphic novel, NATO 2099, which we discuss in this episode.

To get us started, Florence outlines the work of the Research Division at the NATO Defence College, and we discuss the challenges of looking beyond known and predictable futures. We reflect on the fast pace of change across many domains today, and our collective experience of 'future shock' as we grapple with many different kinds of uncertainty and transition at one time. Florence discusses some of the ways in which war in particular is being transformed, pointing to cognitive warfare, biological warfare and grey war, where distinctions between military and civilian spheres of action become blurred.

This leads us to consider the tools we can cultivate to predict the unpredictable. We chat about the power of boredom in prompting us to pay attention to 'weak signals' and the role of imagination in visualising future scenarios. Florence stresses the importance of creative methods, both to foster and to communicate futures thinking. She discusses some of her own initiatives in this space, such as the creation of 'newspapers from the future'; and we delve deep into her graphic novel NATO 2099, which transports readers to a world that our children and grandchildren might inhabit, prompting us to reflect on both technological and human methods of prediction.

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 Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, Alice interviews Professor Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, based at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and Professor Lee Brice, from Western Illinois University.

Konstantinos’ research focuses on the afterlife of ancient Greece and Rome in the Western world, and several of his publications examine the representation of ancient history on stage and screen. Lee is a military historian, focusing especially on military unrest and indiscipline during the time of Alexander the Great and in the early Roman empire. He contributed a reflective conclusion to a collection of essays which Konstantinos masterminded, published in 2023 as Brill’s Companion to ancient Greek and Roman Warfare on Film.

As Konstantinos puts it, ‘Celluloid antiquity is saturated with images of combat’. In our discussion, we dig deep into how ancient war and peacemaking have been depicted in film from the 1960s to the present day. We track changes across time in the cinematic representation of ancient violence and heroism, in relation to developments in film history and contemporary socio-political contexts. Films such as Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Troy, 300, Gladiator, and Hercules are all unpicked; and along the way we discuss the ways in which they construct masculinity, humanise action heroes, stigmatise Others, and normalise war as a pathway to 'greatness'. We consider how political and military events have influenced the representation of ancient warfare on the one hand, and how films depicting ancient warfare have become commentaries on contemporary contexts on the other. Konstantinos and Lee also discuss the future of 'sword-and-sandel' movies, including the role that AI may increasingly play, and the real-world impacts of evolving trends in cinematic depictions of ancient warfare.

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 Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, Alice interviews two academics who are part of the newly-founded Ancient Peace Studies Network: Professor John Hyland and Dr Rhyne King.

John is a professor of ancient history at Christopher Newport University, specialising in the history of Achaemenid Persia and its relations with Classical Greece and ancient Anatolia, during the 6th-4th centuries BCE. He is the author of Persian Interventions: the Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta 450-386 BCE (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and co-editor of Brill's Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires (Brill, 2024), and he has a new book just out called Persia's Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Empire on the Achaemenid Frontier (Oxford, 2025).

Rhyne is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, who also researches the Achaemenid Persian Empire, drawing on Greek historiographical sources (Herodotus, Xenophon, etc.) and documentary evidence in Middle Eastern languages such as Akkadian, Elamite, and Aramaic.His first book, published with the University of California press in 2025, is called The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire.

This episode digs into different conceptualisations of peace and peacebuilding across the Achaemenid Persian Empire, exploring it both from a domestic viewpoint and in the light of interstate relations. We touch on sources such as the famous Cyrus Cylinder, and its ongoing resonance in Iranian identity-building and international politics today. And we explore the peace rhetoric of kings such as Darius I, as seen in e.g. the Bīsotūn monument. The conversation considers the relationship between peace and order, peace and the gods, and peace and 'paradise'; and we also discuss the insights which ancient Persian peace imaginaries might offer on modern concepts and practices.

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 Ancient Peace Studies Network.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin