A Model for the Class I Hope to Teach

Professor Francie Cate-Arries is the author of the influential Spanish Culture Under Barbed Wire. Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps.1939-45 (2004). She also led what must have been an amazing class -- to teach and to take -- on memory in Madrid:



I am beginning to lay the groundwork for a similar project that has come out of the four-way intersection of post-dissertation research, a class I taught on contemporary literature and film of the Spanish Civil War, a Memory Studies honors seminar and the personal ties I have formed thanks to my Spanish blog. The class I envision will be taught partially in the United States and partially in situ. It will be interdisciplinary in nature and feature an extended, yearly field trip to one or several "sites of memory," which will vary. Hopefully, it will be team-taught. Perhaps, my teaching partner will alternate. I expect to bring together the study of literature and culture, psychology and history/politics.

As I outline the course, research locations and consider practical issues, I come back repeatedly to my concerns about memory tourism and how to prevent this sort of encounter or experience. Certainly, studying this issue will be essential prior to any potential interactions with survivors and/or their descendants, as well as the physical locations we might inhabit temporarily. I think that careful, frequent reflection will be key, as well as a clearly-outlined rationale and purpose prior to any excursion here or abroad.

Currently, I am reading Memory and the Future, because, as the editors state in the introduction, "For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies is inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself -- and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized -- can potentially hinder efforts to move forward" (1). As I have used literature and film to discuss memory and amnesia, I have come to realize that scholars have neglected memory's future. What is the future of memory?

I will report more on developments in the above endeavor in the coming months.