Jay Winter

Who is Jay Winter?

Jay Murray Winter is an American historian. He is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, where he focuses his research on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. His other interests include remembrance of war in the 20th century, such as memorial and mourning sites, European population decline, the causes and institutions of war, British popular culture in the era of the First World War and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He is completing a biography of René Cassin.

He obtained his A.B. at Columbia and his Ph.D. at Cambridge. Winter is also affiliated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Peronne, France, a research center and museum of the First World War in European cultural history.

Winter is an influential scholar in the study of the First World War and its place in twentieth-century European history and culture. His earlier work was largely that of social history, including The Great War and the British People focuses on the war's demographic impact on the British population. In more recent works he has taken the approach of a cultural historian, most notably in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning where he advocates a more transnational focus for studying the war and European culture. In this book, he analyzes the various ways the people of Germany, France and Great Britain mourned their losses during and after the war.