CFP: Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining - NY, March 2013

This sounds like an exciting conference, with Marianne Hirsch as keynote speaker. I am currently reading Hirsch's The Generation of Postmemory.

CFP: Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining: The Practices of Memory
1-2 March, 2013
Keynote speaker: Professor Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
“Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.”
–Pierre Nora

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the crucial role of memory in formulating our individual and communal identities, and to examine the scholarly discipline of memory itself. We hope to initiate conversations about memory as an active and ongoing cognitive process rather than simply a reaction to past experiences or a set of “facts” frozen in time. While memory purports to preserve the past in the present, it is inherently protean and unstable, and prone to fictionalizing. Indeed, memory and imagination are tightly intertwined; memory and ideology are closely bound; and our memory of what has come before constantly shapes our understanding of and expectations about what is still to come.
This interdisciplinary conference, then, will explore not only this desire to make memory sacred but also our ability to forget, to forget that we've forgotten, and to imagine the past in a way that fits neatly into our worldviews. These questions are particularly relevant in the wake of recent revolutions and social movements in the Arab World, Europe, and even the United States; learning to reinvent the past in a certain way helps us to reimagine the future, and thus inaugurate change. Consequently, we invite proposals that explore the various and variegated practices of memory as figured through literature, culture, politics, and scholarship generally.
We welcome individual abstracts of 250 words or panel proposals of 750 words, for three participants, to practicesofmemory@gmail.com by November 15, 2012. In addition to traditional academic papers, the committee encourages creative literary work, performance art, and multi-media presentations that in some way address the topic.

Presenters might consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• How is memory practiced through literature, art, film, or culture?
• Who remembers? What is remembered? What is forgotten? Whose voices are heard? Whose voices are suppressed?
• What is the role of “postmemory,” with its focus on the trauma of the past?
• How is memory understood in early eras, such as medieval or early modern?
• How do texts treat or reflect the past?
• How does the past help us prepare for the future?
• What is the role of imagination in memory or nostalgia?
• How is memory mediated by “memory makers” and memorials?
• In what ways has postmodernism influenced the study of memory?
• What is the role of psychoanalysis in memory studies?
• In what ways does the state repress and/or produce memory?
• How do neoconservatist or neoliberalist movements treat the past?
• How do memorializing objects—texts, photographs, monuments—produce and /or subvert an official state narrative?
• What is the role of affect in producing collective memory?

Marianne Hirsch to speak at Washington University in St. Louis

The renowned memory scholar Marianne Hirsch will be speaking at Washington University in St. Louis on November 8 at 4 pm. The talk is free and open to the public. Marianne Hirsch's name is most often linked to her formulation of "postmemory" in the book Family Frames and in subsequent articles written individually and with her partner Leo Spitzer.

I read the news of Hirsch's visit to St. Louis with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, because just 3 years ago, I was a student at Wash U and the focus of my dissertation was postmemory in contemporary Spain.  While I will be attending a conference in St. Louis next week, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this talk. During my 6 years at Washington University, I was able to hear many exciting, renowned speakers from a variety of disciplines. Anyone in the St. Louis area that researches memory should make time to attend this important lecture!!

Examining the role of memory in reconstructing family history
Marianne Hirsch to deliver Holocaust Memorial Lecture for Assembly Series Nov. 8
October 21, 2010
By Barbara Rea

For many children of Holocaust survivors — collectively known as the “second generation” — there is a longing to understand pre-war life, culture and community experienced by their parents before the trauma of expulsion, incarceration and brutalization.

Marianne Hirsch, PhD, a member of this generation and a distinguished scholar on memory and cultural history, argues that post-Holocaust generations, with their profound need to vicariously participate in this bygone world, experience “postmemory” — a term Hirsch has coined to convey the ways generations born after the Holocaust access the experiences of the witnesses through mediation and imaginative reconstruction.

Hirsch will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis to explore these themes for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, an Assembly Series program at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “Rites of Return: The Afterlife of the Holocaust in Jewish Memory,” is free and open to the public.

“Postmemory refers to the ways in which generations born after a traumatic event access the experiences of the witnesses,” says Erin McGlothlin, PhD, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Holocaust Lecture Committee, “not through actual remembrance and recall, but through imaginative projection and re-creation.”

Images play an especially important role in this re-creation, she says.

McGlothlin also notes that, although postmemory as a concept was created to understand the Holocaust, it can be used to mine cultural memory for any traumatic event.

“In recent years, scholars have extended the concept of postmemory far beyond the particular context of the Holocaust to refer to the generational memory of disparate historical and cultural events,” McGlothlin says.

Thanks to the Internet and to several trips back to Czernowitz, Hirsch has reconstructed the once thriving center of Jewish life in Ukraine, where her parents lived.

With her husband, Leo Spitzer, she has produced a book called Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz, which explores the city that before the war was an important center of Central European Jewish intellectual life. Reviewer Monica Szurmuk, of theworld.org, writes that “Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book Ghosts of Home is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search.”

Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also teaches at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and co-directs its Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.

In addition to the Czernowitz publication, Hirsch has written many books, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Familial Gaze; and Time and the Literary. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including the indispensable MLA guide, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.

She is the recipient of a host of fellowships and has served as editor of the journal PMLA. She is on the advisory boards of two journals, Memory Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Hirsch earned bachelors, master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University.

For more information on this and upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.