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.

Judge Baltasar Garzón to speak next week at University of Washington

Judge Baltasar Garzón will speak at the University of Washington (Seattle) next Tuesday, February 23, at 6 pm. Information on the talk follows. If you are able to attend -- unfortunately, I am not - I would really appreciate you sharing your reflections here via the "comments" feature of this post. Perhaps they will put up a podcast or video, so we may all take part in the discussion.

Baltasar Garzón, the esteemed Spanish judge and human rights advocate, will deliver a major public lecture on the topic of “Human Rights and Historical Memory.” His lecture, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Gates Public Service Law Program. His lecture is also one in a year-long linked film and lecture series, “Lives, History, Memory: The Spanish Civil War Seventy Years After" that is sponsored by the Department of History's Hanauer Outreach Fund and other units on campus, including the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Garzón is one of the six investigating judges for Spain’s National Court. His function is to investigate the cases that are assigned to him by the court, gathering evidence and evaluating whether the case should be brought to trial. He does not try the cases himself. Garzón rose to prominence as an international figure with his indictment of leaders of the former Chilean military junta, including dictator Augusto Pinochet, on charges of genocide, terrorism and torture during the 1973-1990 dictatorship. Garzón has also played a key role in indicting suspected Basque terrorists. Most recently he has brought charges against the Franco regime for crimes against humanity, and ordered the exhumation of mass graves from Spain's bloody civil war (1936-39). For more information, contact Prof. Tony Geist
(tgeist@uw.edu , 206-543-2022).