New Perspectives on WarTIME with Beryl Pong

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