Winter 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.[2]
Winter earlier work largely focused on social history, including The Great War and the British People (1986) 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 (1995) 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.[3]
At Yale, he teaches a lecture course entitled "Europe in the Age of Total War, 1914-1945," in which he argues that World War I, World War II, and the inter-war period, are better understood as one "European Civil War." He also teaches a seminar entitled "The First World War."[citation needed]
He also worked with American demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum on high levels of migration toward countries experiencing fairly low fertility rates (The Fear of Population Decline, 1986 and A Question of Numbers, 1998).[citation needed]
Works
Socialism and the Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18 (Routledge, 1974)
The Fear of Population Decline (with Michael S. Teitelbaum) (Academic Press, 1986)
The Great War and the British People (Harvard University Press, 1986)
The Experience of World War I (Macmillan, 1988)
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996)
A Question of Numbers (with Michael S. Teitelbaum) (1998)
War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1999, editor)
Oliver, Lizzie. "Jay Winter, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present." Journal of Contemporary History 55.2 (2020): 443-445.
Winter, Jay. "Learning the Historian’s Craft" (H-Diplo 13 November 2020) online autobiography