Abstracts Archive

The partition of the Indian subcontinent which was an epoch-defining moment in the history of modern South Asia marked the end of British dominion over the Indian landscape, and also subsequently led to the creation of twin states of India and Pakistan. This seminal event of the twentieth century is...

Re-enactments have become an increasingly popular mode of predominantly war-related history. In contrast to conventional modes of historical inquiry, re-enactment offers a 'body-based discourse' through which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experiences. So far, most studies...

The concept of postmemory (Hirsch) focuses on the transmission of memory within families. But what is a family? What memories are transmitted and how, and what memories are not shared between generations? How is transmission interfered with, interrupted or blocked? My research with daughters and son...

As Freudian psychoanalysis described it, oblivion is neither a malfunction or a gap of memory but an active process of erasement related with repression. Based on memory studies that specifically take forgetting as a topic (Loraux, Ferro, Heinrich, Guenée), this paper will consider such oblivions a...

Last January, after the screening at the State Duma of the film Soyuz Spaseniya (Andrey Kravchuk, 2019), about the Decembrist revolt in 1825, Vladimir Zhirinovski, Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, told the press the following:"A wonderful film; it shows an important moment of our...

'Mind the Gap': The Re-Emergence of the Imperial Past in British PoliticsReferences to empire or the imperial past flourished both during and following the Brexit debate. Boris Johnson was confident about Britain signing new trade deals, since 'we used to run the biggest empire the world...

In the late history of modernity, there have been at least two major events that have (un)expectedly converged, interrupting the triumphant march of modernist progress and development. The first event revolved around the socialist modernity project and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, embod...

This presentation investigates the role cultural products and practices produced, narrated and/or inspired by women and members of the LGBTQ community of the early 21st century play in Colombia in the context of public debates about writing and documenting the historical legacies of violence, and in...

This paper explores the complex relationship between literary art and artificial memory in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and its afterlife in Liz Moore's The Unseen World. Both works engage with artificial memory from its classical roots to its contemporary expression ...

Although African American Romare Bearden is now considered one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century, his early work has never received the attention it deserves. This may be because its aggressive political messages contrast too much with his later, less activist, and more mai...

This paper is part of my Master's Thesis under the same title submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts; Nationalism Studies Program; Central European University; Budapest 2020The paper looks at the state policy towards Stalin and his legacy on the exampl...

In nowadays Russia, people are facing numerous manifestations of nostalgia associated with various historical events and phenomena. It could be the Stalinist USSR, the era of Perestroika, or the "dashing" versus "free" vision of the 1990s. At the same time, we see the beginning of a conversation...

My paper is about the phenomenon of historical memory of Joseph Stalin in the museums. The museum as an institution has a very important role in maintaining memory in the society. According to Marcin Kula's theory, the museum is a "carrier of memory". After the collapse of the Soviet Union, 15 ne...

Authors, artists, and activists of the generation of postmemory insist on their rights to represent, remember, and shape public memory of the comfort women atrocity through cultural productions such as literature, the visual arts, and protest. They engage with the atrocity through what Marianne Hirs...

The stories of New Orleans have always unfolded as a tale of two cities-the booming, vibrant, best-known neighborhoods famous for their Mardi Gras traditions, juxtaposed alongside the poverty, violence, dislocation, and racial segregation experienced by the city's most vulnerable populations. In the...

Following the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia during the Unit the Right Rally and the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, numerous monuments to the Confederacy were vandalized across the United States. In Phoenix, Arizona, a monument to former Confederate Presi...

Urban equipment and public places are not empty physical objects, but rather culturally charged devices bearing narratives that compose the symbolic dimension of the city. Each street, building, public square, and so on, participates in our everyday lives, for example, by helping us locating and rec...

This paper looks into writer Aminatta Forna's critical engagement with transitional justice processes in her novel The Hired Man (2013).  Born in Scotland and raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain, Forna has shown a sustained concern with civil conflict and post-conflict reconstruction i...

This presentation analyzes the affects and emotions of survivors of Franco dictatorship (Spain, 1939-1975) from the crossroads of anthropology of emotions, feminist epistemology and memory studies.Based on life stories of women who were persecuted by the regime, the presentation explores the emotion...

Ruins are empty places filled with memories. These cement or rock skeletons can be the aftermath of a force of nature, environmental imbalance or human behaviour. Places may become the agents and bearers of memory even in its ravaged shapes. This paper is a result of a PhD investigation and it aims ...

From its very beginning, ekphrasis has been based on the idea of convergence – as the tension between different media lies at its core. Traditionally, it has been defined as the description and analysis of works of art in poetry, and so it has been understood as the verbalization of visual ima...

After the Euromaidan and subsequent Russian occupation of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas, Ukraine has left the Russian political orbit. The new government introduced amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution that set forth a strategic course for acquiring membership in the EU and NATO. Consequen...

Warsaw was the only capital behind the Iron Curtain that did not commit to the construction of a Joseph's Stalin monument after the Second World War. Nevertheless, this does not mean that no attempt was made to erect a sculpture of Generalissimus. The paper describes the history of memory and the tr...

17th century Pernambuco, a north-eastern captaincy of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, was marked by the presence of an insurgent counter-society, founded in the hinterland by rebel slaves. For about a century this community, today known as the Quilombo of Palmares, persisted as a space of autonomy ...

The 'Memorial to the Victims of Communism-Canada, a Land of Refuge' is scheduled to be unveiled in spring 2020 in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Situated between the Supreme Court and the National Archives, this material act of commemoration is best conceptualized as a form of 'memory enclosure,' on...

In Germany, some 100,000 memorials to the First World War had been erected, from simple boulders bearing a plaque to large and elaborate constructions. From the very beginning, these memorials were accompanied by heated public discussions: who should be remembered, and with which intentions? When th...

 The decolonization of India after 200 years of the British Raj was coterminous with the Partition of the country along religious-ethnic lines in 1947. Genocidal violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs during the Partition led to two million deaths and displaced over twelve-sixteen million peopl...

Durante la última dictadura militar en Argentina (1976-1983), las fuerzas armadas y de seguridad persiguieron, secuestraron y desaparecieron a miles de militantes políticos y sociales. En el marco de esta represión, alrededor de 500 niños/as, hijos/as de estos militantes, fueron apropiados por l...

Memorials have become increasingly relevant in societies seeking to come to terms with the past of mass violence, and there is a growing body of academic scholarship that scrutinises the politics of memory in divided societies. This paper takes a different approach to the politics of memorials: it d...

This study aims to investigate how individual memories could help build a collective memory, through the case of historical photographs taken at Foto Gagin, a photo studio which was active during the years 1902-1955 in Izmir, Turkey. This study is largely based on photographs that are part of a hist...