Emmy-award winner and Yale University Professor of History Jay Winter will speak at Illinois State University about World War I and its impact on the globe.

Winter, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale, will present The Great War 100 Years after: A Transnational Approach at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 26, in the Prairie Room of the Bone Student Center.

The event is free and open to the public. As part of the Speaker Series at Illinois State University, the talk is sponsored by Illinois State’s Department of History, the Office of the President, the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the ISU Foundation Fund.

Winter was co-producer, co-writer and chief historian for the PBS series The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, which won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award and a Producers Guild of America Award for best television documentary.

He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books on World War I, including Socialism and the Challenge of War, Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18; The Great War and the British People; The Fear of Population Decline; The Experience of World War I; Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century; Remembering War: The Great War Between History and Memory in the 20th Century and Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century. He is also the co-author of René Cassin et les droits de l’homme, which won the prize for best book of the year at the Blois History Festival in 2011.

He is co-director of the project on Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919. The effort has produced two volumes published by Cambridge University Press. 

Earning a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and Ph.D. and DLitt degrees from Cambridge University, Winter taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 2000 and then the Yale faculty one year later. At Yale, his courses range from lectures on Europe in the age of total war and modern British history to seminars on history and memory, as well as European identities.

Winter has presented named lectures at Dartmouth College, Union University, Indiana University and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Graz, Austria.

The Speaker Series of Illinois State University seeks to bring innovative and enlightening speakers to the campus with the aim of providing the community with a platform to foster dialogue, cultivate enriching ideas, and continue an appreciation of learning as an active and lifelong process.