Open lecture: Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Welcome to the open lecture Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form with Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark.

A common approach in the humanities has been to trace the impact of war on a broad range of art works. But the pervasive militarization of aesthetics in the twenty-first century raises a different set of questions: what is the impact of aesthetics on war? To what extent is warfare itself an aesthetic phenomenon? And how has the creative world-making of art been co-opted by military institutions and merged with the destructive forces of war?

In his new book Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form (SUP, 2023) Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today’s creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art, but as an aesthetic art from.

In this open lecture, Anders Engberg-Pedersen will give an overview of his book and present some of its key findings.

Anders Engberg-Pedersen’s bio

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark and Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a Dr.phil. in Neuere Deutsche Literatur from Humboldt Universität (cotutelle). His research centers on literature, aesthetics, war, and technology. He is the author of Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard University Press, 2015), Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), and he has edited and co-edited numerous volumes, most recently War and Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He serves as editor of the book series Prisms: Humanities and War with MIT Press.

Live broadcast

The lecture will also be broadcasted live on Zoom: https://fhs-se.zoom.us/j/3404734610