Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He serves as René Cassin Chair of Human Rights Studies and is a member of the Board of Governors at the Council for Global Cooperation. 

Winter is a noted historian and a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. He is considered as an influential scholar whose research in the study of the First World War and its place in twentieth century European history and culture hold significant and authoritative values in academia. His other research 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 the author and co-author of several books, including 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), War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and most recently, The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Winter was also co-producer, co-writer, and chief historian for the PBS/BBC 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 in 1997.  He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the University of Leuven, and the University of Paris. He obtained his BA from Columbia University (1966) and a Ph.D. from University of Cambridge (1970).