JNT Dialogue: Speaker Series

JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory presents: "Narrative of War in Life, Literature, and Film," an evening of dialogue with U.S. Marine Corps veteran and National Book Award-winning author Phil Klay and distinguished scholar Dr. Stacey Peebles. Join us as they explore the narrative strategies, tensions, and disruptions veterans, artists, and the public use to make sense of our 21st-century conflicts.

Phil Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, award-winning novelist and essayist, and the current President of PEN America. His short story collection, Redeployment (2014), won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. Currently director of Fairfield University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, he is also the author of the celebrated novel Missionaries (2020) and the essay collection Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (2022). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Professor Klay’s writing explores the tension between the lived experiences of soldiers and the mythic narratives society creates around them, focusing on the impact this has on veterans and the hurdles it creates for meaningful communication and shared understanding between veterans and civilian society.

Dr. Stacey Peebles is Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Centre College. She is the author of two groundbreaking scholarly works, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (2011), and The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy (2024). Dr. Peebles’ scholarship on the cultural representation of 21st-century military conflicts crosses multiple disciplinary fields, and focuses particularly on veterans' experiences of war and its aftermath and the narratives we create about them. Dr. Peebles has written extensively not just about the fiction and nonfiction of the Iraq War, but also examines films—ranging from Academy Award Winners (The Hurt Locker) to Star Wars fantasies of "endless/forever wars"—as well as civilian and soldier vlogs, podcasts, and other new journalistic forms that are in dialogue with the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.