Abstracts Archive

In 1912 the 'Reapers of Poland' a provocative theatre play set during the peasant rebellion in 1794 was performed for the first time for the audiences in Barcelona. A few year later, the street of Poland was inaugurated in the same city.These two examples of early twentieth century memory culture ar...

Contemporary Ukrainian history offers fascinating cases of re-/de-bordering processes that provide evidence for how decision-makers and everyday citizens can change the historical course of the state. Border issues are particularly relevant to Ukraine, a country which has always been a borderland zo...

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I am interested in interrogating memories of marginality as represented in selected poems inspired by the River Niger and River Benue, which are two of the most important bodies of water in Africa and Nigeria and whose history intersects with coloniality and the evolving postc...

In a new political climate that expects expressions of remorse for past atrocities, public memorialization provides one means to this end. This paper takes a close look at two such spaces: Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe commemorating Jewish victims of the Holocaust (2005), and Mont...

This paper is about the historical memory in today's Lithuanian territory during World War I and its relation to postcolonial discourse. World War I is a very important period if we want to see many different interpretations of one base of collective memory: we can see here many completely different...

The paper focuses on how historians produce the meaning-making of Zheltoksan 1986 in post-1991 Kazakhstan. The Zheltoksan 1986 is the protest that occurred in December of 1986 in Kazakhstan initially erupted after the dismissal of Dinmiukhamed Konaev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ka...

While coming in contact with the remnants of German cultures after the forced disappearance of the previous inhabitants, the new settlers in Polish "Recovered Territories" after 1945 were trying to include the objects that were left into the space of their everyday practices and produce a coherent m...

The present paper discusses the memory of fascism in post-Communist Romania. Through the lens of the movement for canonization as saints of the former members of the Romanian fascist movement known as the Legion of Archangel Michael deceased during their imprisonment during the Communist years, a qu...

The memory of the Second World War has remained a heavily disputed subject in the Baltic States, where the narratives of the Soviet and Nazi occupations continue to remain competitive. In my presentation I will focus on women's memory of the Second World War in the Baltic States involving both major...

How do the stories we tell ourselves about the past inform what we think about the present? What role do performances of history play in shaping those narratives? How might these performances become more "real" than the history itself? My paper is part of a larger project about the fluid p...

Besides the narrator's evolving memory and re-evaluation of the past events that permanently challenges the self-narrative, the life writing is subject to both external censorship and self-censorship. The self-narratives related to trauma are to various degrees the results of the author's self-censo...

Survivor-historian Saul Friedländer makes a compelling case for integrating history and memory.   Yet, he refers to a continuum of public-collective memory and "'dispassionate' historical inquiries." From these two polar locations, history and memory move toward each other-seeking out the ...

A Professor and member of the Academy of Art in Berlin is suspended from the Academy for his Jewish origin in George Roland's movie "The Wandering Jew" from 1933. Shot in the United States in Yiddish, this movie tackles the subject of anti-Semitism in Germany head on. As the fictional Professor Artu...

There is a significant divergence in the way the International Crimes Tribunal for Bangladesh (ICT-BD) has been perceived by international and domestic audiences. The majority of western commentators have focused on issues of strict legality and have argued that the ICT-BD has failed to fulfil "inte...

A photo album as a medium of memory has a long history. Its precursor was Amicorum Album, widespread in Europe since the sixteenth - a student book containing entries of friends and professors collected as a souvenir, before graduation. In addition to the written text, these albums contained initial...

Do refugees reshape long-term political behavior in receiving areas? To investigate this question, I examine the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into West Germany at the end of WWII. Expellees were strangers to the cultural practices in their new surroundings. Tensions with natives f...

This paper aims to examine photography in post-war, post-colonial Japan and South Korea, focusing on the ways in which artists challenge official memories and create counter-hegemonic memories. After the end of the Pacific War, both countries witnessed the growing presence of the U.S. and its milit...

This paper explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shaped revolutionary memories in the People's Republic of China (PRC) through the use of a dynamic unity of multimedia commemoration techniques including both the built environment as well as education and mass media. As early as 1951, ri...

Romanian aristocrats, descendants of boyars from Moldavia and Wallachia, faced the loss of family memory during the repressive communist regime. One of the main characteristics of any aristocracy is the call to memory, the identification by reference to the ancestors' great deeds, to the antiquity o...

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the representation of perpetrator perspectives in artistic and literary responses to the Holocaust (Shoah). Many of these works seek to explore shameful memories of complicity and guilt, which have often remained concealed within the confines of ...

Gyula Flohr's life was not exceptional, nor were the historical and personal circumstances that shaped it. His story is that of an often authoritarian and hypermasculine East Central European entrepreneur who was understandably hostile towards the state. He grew up in a coal dealer Jewish family in ...

The Fountain of Tears and Marian Kolodziej's Labyrinth - Memory wars and identity politics at Auschwitz.In the summer of 2019, I participated in a summer program at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum where we visited Marian's Kolodziej's haunting testimonial exhibition called the Labyrinth. It was ...

This study explores the temporalities of the representation of the postmemory generation on "comfort women". "Comfort women" is the euphemistic term to refer victims from all over the Asia and the Netherlands who were forced to do sexual service for soldiers and civilians attached to the military in...