Events
Previous Events
Laanes teaches at the CBEES Summer School 2024
15 August 2024
Laanes discusses memory and translation and translational transnationalism in Central and Eastern Europe Read more ...
At the CBEEES Summer School Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the “Post” Laanes discusses memory and translation and translational transnationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. The summerschool is organised by Södertörn University in Sigtuna.
Read more ...Project panel at MSA Lima
17-20 July 2024
The project organises the panel Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena at Memory Studies Association Annual Conference in Lima, Peru Read more ...
The project team organises the panel Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena at Memory Studies Association Annual Conference in Lima, Peru.
Hanna Aunin talks about Holocaust memory in Lithuanian film Isaac. Margaret Tali explores the Narva tank as a museum object after its removal from its orginal site along the Narva river, Estonia. Margaret Comer views the response of the Estonian museum and heritage sector to war in Ukraine. Anita Pluwak discusses issues of memory in female-authored conservative fiction in Poland. The panel is chaired by Eneken Laanes.
Laanes presents her own paper on early visual histories of the Holocaust in Estonia in the panel Activating Photographic Archives, Challenging Hegemonic Narratives.
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Guido Bartolini
10 May 2024
What Happened to Italian Fascism? Placing the Study of Fascist Italy in Memory Studies’ Research Read more ...
Guido Bartolini, Ghent University
What Happened to Italian Fascism? Placing the Study of Fascist Italy in Memory Studies’ Research
10 May 2024 16.00 in room M-649, Tallinn University
In 2005, Enzo Traverso argued that a problematic trend was affecting European culture; while the notion of totalitarianism was spreading, there was a progressive “disparition de la notion de ‘fascism’ du champ historiographique” [disappearance of the concept of ‘fascism’ from historiography]. Nearly twenty years later, with the worrying rise of far-right and populist movements around the world, the landscape has changed drastically, and discussions about fascism and its possible resurgence have gained momentum. Within the current cultural and political landscape, the Italian context can offer some interesting points of reflection for anyone interested in questions of memory. On the one hand, as the birthplace of the first Fascist movement, Italy has a long tradition of dealing with its dictatorial past, especially through cultural mediation; on the other hand, scholars and memory activists have often criticised the country’s collective memory, arguing that Italy has failed to come to terms with its Fascist past. In this talk, I will examine some of the main trends and debates that have characterised Italian memory culture, discussing them from the perspective of transnational memory studies and cultural memory studies. The talk will show that by conceptualising many of the shortcomings of Italian memory through theories of responsibility, complicity, and implication, it is possible to gain important insights into the process of dealing with the past, which are relevant for understanding the relationship between the present and the past beyond Italian culture.
Guido Bartolini is a FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and the idea of responsibility for the past. He has published articles on the representation of Fascism and World War II in Italian literature and cinema. He is the author of The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan: 2021) and the co-editor of Fascism in Italian Culture: 1945-2023 (a special issue of the journal Annali d’Italianistica, 2023) and Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures (forthcoming with De Gruyter in July 2024). He co-chairs the Memory Studies AssociationWorking Group on Memory and Literature.
Read more ...Laanes presents at the conference Iconographies of the Holocaust
18-20 April 2024
Laanes speaks about early visual histories of the Holocaust in Estonia Read more ...
Laanes speaks about early visual histories of the Holocaust in Estonia at the conference Iconographies of the Holocaust: Visual Representations and Migrating Materialities of War and Genocide Since 1945 taking place at Brown University, US.
Read more ...Laanes teaches at the winter school on Semiotics of Political and Strategic Communication
29 January 2024
Laanes discusses the role of historical narratives in strategic communication Read more ...
At the winter school Semiotics of Political and Strategic Communication organised by the University of Tartu Laanes holds three lectures on historical narratives, heritage, political polarisation and securitisation of memory.
Read more ...Project panel at ASEEES 2023
3 December 2023
The project organises the panel Decolonizing (Eastern) European Memory Studies in the Wake of Russian Aggression Read more ...
The panel brings together esteemed scholars working on different regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Jessie Barton Hronesova speaks on Explicit and Implicit Memory Mobilization in Eastern Europe in the Wake of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in the speeches of Central European political leaders. Violeta Davoliute offers a critical reading of the concept of ontological security and of how it has been applied to studies of collective memory in Eastern Europe. Eneken Laanes presents on Baltic Forest Brothers at the Intersections of National and Transnational Memory Regimes. Ksenia Robber explores the de-nationalisation of the memories of post-socialists transitions beyond right-wing appropriations. The panel is chaired by Eneken Laanes. The discussant of the panel is Natalia Aleksiun.
Read more ...Workshop Decolonising the Eastern European Past and Memory Through the Lens of Audio-Visual Archives
17-18 November 2023
Project workshop with public keynote lectures by Alison Landsberg and Ewa Mazierska Read more ...
Friday, 17 November
14:00 – Visit to the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia
16:00 – Coffeebreak
16:30-17:45 – Keynote adress (open to public, M-213)
“Constellating the Past and Present: Towards a Theory of Audiovisual Counterhegemonic History Writing” Professor Alison Landsberg (Department of History and Art History, George Mason University)
18:30 – Dinner
Saturday, 18 November
09.30-11.15 – Panel 1: Legibility of the Archives: (Trans)national Tensions and Local Histories
“Soviet Film History without Russia: Reconsidering the Archives of Soviet Cinema” (Raisa Sidenova, Media, Culture and Heritage, Newcastle University)
“Unpacking my Archival Findings: Thoughts on the Chaos of Memory and Archival Resistance to Historical Legibility” (Ana Grgić, Department of Cinema and Media, Babeș-Bolyai University)
“Distant Journey through the Desktop: The Ethics of Approaching Holocaust Footage in the Online Space” (Jiří Anger, Queen Mary University of London / National Film Archive in Prague)
11:15-11:45 – Coffee Break
11:45-13:00 – Keynote address (open to public, M-213)
“The Role of Film Archives in Creating the Canons of Eastern European Cinema” Professor Ewa Mazierska (School of Arts and Media, University of Central Lancashire)
13:00-14:00 – Lunch
14.00-15:15 – Panel 2 (Re)constructing History and Memory through the Archives
“Translating Memories Through Appropriated Archival Footage from Fiction Films” (Martin Palúch, Institute of Theatre and Film Research of The Art Research Centre, Slovak Academy of Sciences)
“The Shadow of Oru Palace. The clash of narratives at the site of a national monument” (Aap Tepper, Film Archives, The National Archives of Estonia)
15:15-15:45 – Coffee Break
15:45-17:00 – Panel 3 Institutional and Legal Context of Private and Public Archives
“Revisiting Private Memories in Hungary – The Case of the Private Photo and Film Foundation” (Lucy Szemetová, University of St Andrews)
“The Drama of Legislation: Regulating Access to the National Film Archive in Romania” (Diana Popa, Tallinn University)
17:00-17:30 – General Discussion
18:30 – Optional: Film screening (PÖFF – Black Nights Film Festival)
More than thirty years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine brought Eastern Europe to global attention. As Roma Sendyka (2022) recently noted, Eastern Europe today confronts the global arena with a new multivocal discourse shaped by the voices of students, doctoral candidates, young scholars and artists that demands a decolonial view of the region. This workshop proposes to take up this call to decolonise the Eastern European past from the joint perspective of visual media (broadly understood) and memory studies. It aims to map a theoretical and practice-based view of the region’s past and memory by focusing on Eastern European audio-visual archives and valorising the recent proliferation of artistic practices of archival appropriation in film and film adjacent media in the region.
Organizers:
Tallinn University, ERC project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the
Global Arena
Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia
Post-Socialist Memory Cultures in Transition
20-23 September 2023
The project hosts 2nd PoSoCoMeS Conference at Tallinn University Read more ...
2nd PoSoCoMeS Conference
20-23 September 2023, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
Please see the programme and register here
The Post-Socialist and Comparative Memory Studies (PoSoCoMeS) working group is part of the Memory Studies Association. Our goal is to bring together researchers, activists, and practitioners working in and on post-socialist countries. We call for trans-regional comparative studies that connect Eastern Europe and Africa, Latin America and Asia, and result in broad conceptualizations of post-socialist memories.
Post-socialist and Eastern European memory studies have been thrown into crisis by the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. On the one hand, the war has belied the “never again” of historical violence, state terror, rape and torture in the region. On the other, it has highlighted the continued importance of the scrutiny of the ways in which historical narratives about the past are weaponized by present political leaders to justify new waves of historical violence and state terror.
In this conference, we aim to explore change in post-socialist memory cultures, with a particular focus on Eastern, Central and South Eastern European memory cultures that emerged/are emerging from the tensions and interactions between the transnational, the regional, the national and the local and are further exacerbated by the Russian destructive military invasion of Ukraine. Possible topics include:
– uses and abuses of memory in contemporary and ongoing conflicts, weaponization of the past (especially in the context of the war in Ukraine)
– transnational memory in the post-socialist world: vernacularisation, encapsulation
tangled relationships between memory and human rights
– politics of memory: key agents and institutions
– the workings of memory in relation to (new) social challenges: climate crisis, migration, social inequality
– regional regimes of memory: post-socialism as a regime of memory, continuities and/or re-formations, memory traffic within post-socialist space
– reconfiguration of the borders between communities
– memory and translation: movement of memories across national and regional borders, forms and templates
– media of memory (film, literature, memorial museums, commemorative practices), remediation
– new forms of digital memorialisation in the post-pandemic era
post-socialist/post-communist memory culture in relation to the rest of the world: post-socialist comparisons with other parts of the world, to allow for trans-regional comparative studies that connect Eastern Europe and Africa, Latin America and Asia and result in broad conceptualizations of post-socialist memories
The keynote speakers are:
Erica Lehrer (Concordia University, Canada)
Maria Mälksoo (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Andrea Petö (Central European University, Austria)
Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Centre for East European and International Studies, Germany)
Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw, Poland)
There will be two special streams that focus on the themes of the co-organizing research projects.
Mnemonic Pluralism and Critical Dialogue in the Museum
Through the concept of mnemonic pluralism, which links memory to the principles of democratic pluralism, this special stream explores the ways museums deal with the complexities of the 20th century and the multiplicity of competing perceptions of the past in changing political and socio-economic contexts. It aims to establish the factors that undermine or support mnemonic pluralism and reflexive, critical engagement with the complexities of the past: how are the politically laden periods represented in exhibitions and related public programs as well as in collecting work? How are dissonance and difference (ethnic, national, generational, gender, class) addressed? How are divergent group-specific, local, national, and transnational mnemonic discourses linked to each other? What is the relationship between the emergence of pluralistic and deliberative curatorial practices and the museum’s positioning in trans/national and local memoryscapes and vis-à-vis societal challenges? How are the choices of curators, designers, and educators related to their backgrounds as members of memory communities.
Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena
This stream focuses on interconnections between local, national, regional, and global memory cultures in post-socialist countries and their transnationalisation. It is particularly interested in aesthetic media of memory, such as literature, art, cinema, and memorial museums/monuments, that circulate globally and bring local memories to global audiences. This stream explores the attempts in these media to make the histories of the Second World War and Socialist regimes known globally. The stream proposes to look at these movements of memory as a process of translation. What memorial forms have been used to make the Eastern European past intelligible in the global arena? How are global memory cultures vernacularised in the region? What is gained and what is lost in this translation?
Formats
This is an in-person conference. We will be able to accommodate only a limited number of online panels.
Cost and financial support
We do not ask for any registration fee, but all participants have to be members of the Memory Studies Association. Exceptions for those in need are possible, but they have to applied for directly through the Memory Studies Association
Travel and accommodation for our participants from Ukraine is provided by the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria.
Organisers
The 2nd PoSoCoMeS conference will be organized by two major memory studies research projects in Estonia, in collaboration with PoSoCoMes: “Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena”, a European Research Council Grant that has received funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Tallinn University, project leader Eneken Laanes, grant agreement 853385), and “Practices and Challenges of Mnemonic Pluralism in Baltic History Museums”, funded by the Estonian Research Agency (University of Tartu, project leader Ene Kõresaar).
Contact: posocomesconference@tlu.ee
Translating Memories team at the MSA 2023
3-7 July 2023
Presentations by Eneken Laanes, Anita Pluwak, Diana Popa, Hanna Aunin, Margaret Comer Read more ...
Look out for the following presentations by the Translating Memories team at the annual Memory Studies Association conference, taking place this year in Newcastle, UK, 3-7 2023 July.
July 4
15:45-17:15 Eneken Laanes‘s presentation in the panel “Mnemonic Migration”
July 5
10:45 – 12:15 Anita Pluwak‘s presentation “Conspiracy theories as mnemonic practice: Popular conspiracy fiction from postsocialist Poland and the intersecting discourses of memory and suspicion” in the panel “Fictions, facts, and counter-memories”
6 July
11-12:30 Diana Popa‘s presentation “Reworking Romanian and Hungarian Past: Holocaust Memory in Péter Forgács’s and Radu Jude’s Archival Documentaries” in the panel “The Axis Powers in Cultural Memory: Transnational Tropes and (Un)Critical Storytelling about World War II”
11-12:30 Hanna Aunin‘s presentation “Change in the Memory of Estonian Mass Deportations and its Representations through Film: The Awakening (1989) and In the Crosswind (2014)” in the panel “Memories of Displacement”
7 July
11-12:30 Margaret Comer‘s presentation “New Narratives in Times of Conflict: Estonian Museum Responses to the War in Ukraine” in the panel “Re/creating belonging in and through museums”
Read more ...Diana Popa presents at the Conference of the International Association for Media and History “FUTURE [OF] ARCHIVES”
20-22 June 2023
"The Archives in Eastern Europe through the Lens of Archival Films. A Romanian Case Study" Read more ...
Dr Popa gives a presentation “The Archives in Eastern Europe through the Lens of Archival Films. A Romanian Case Study” at the Conference of the International Association for Media and History “FUTURE [OF] ARCHIVES”, taking place at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, 20-22 June 2023.
Read more ...
Margaret Comer presents at the 15th Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe (CBSE): “Turning Points: Values and Conflicting Futures in the Baltics”
17 June 2023
'Dark Heritage in Tallinn: Memory Narratives at Museums of Soviet and Nazi Repression' Read more ...
Dr Comer’s paper ‘Dark Heritage in Tallinn: Memory Narratives at Museums of Soviet and Nazi Repression’ is part of the panel ‘Museum Practices as Memory Work’ (chair: Ene Kõresaar) on 17 June. This presentation will examine several museums connected to Nazi and/or Soviet violence in and around Tallinn, Estonia, through the lens of ‘dark’ and ‘contested’ heritage. It will analyze the narratives of victimhood, perpetration, and suffering that are communicated at these museums, ‘memorial’ or not, and their interpretative mechanisms and lenses, in order to discuss patterns in the area’s overall interpretation and memory of repression. It will particularly focus on how regional and international ‘memorial forms’ related to repression, death, and suffering are adopted and adapted for local use. Case studies include Vabamu and the KGB Prison Cells, Patarei Prison, the Estonian War Museum, and the Estonian Jewish Museum.
The 15th Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe (CBSE) “Turning Points: Values and Conflicting Futures in the Baltics” takes place on 15-17 June 2023, at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. More information and program here: https://aabs-balticstudies.org/cbse-2023-in-kaunas/
Read more ...Aigi Heero’s Presentation at the Baltic-German University Liaison Office Conference “The Abyss in German and Baltic Cultures”
15-16 June 2023
„Nicht nur die Mauer ist gefallen“: ein Blick in die Abgründe der DDR- Nachwendegesellschaft ("It was not just the Wall that has fallen": a look into the abysses of the GDR post-reunification society) Read more ...
On June 16, Dr Heero gives a presentation „Nicht nur die Mauer ist gefallen“: ein Blick in die Abgründe der DDR- Nachwendegesellschaft (“It was not just the Wall that has fallen”: a look into the abysses of the GDR post-reunification society) at the Baltic-German University Liaison Office conference “The Abyss in German and Baltic Cultures”. The conference will take place on June 15 and 16 at Tartu University, in the main hall of Lossi 3. This conference of the Baltic-German University Liaison Office is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. The event will be in German.
More information here: https://maailmakeeled.ut.ee/en/content/conference-abyss-german-and-baltic-cultures
Read more ...Launch of SITES OF RECKONING, a Special Issue of Memory Studies, Volume 16, No. 3
8 June 2023
Join the launch of special issue, which features Dr Margaret Comer's article Lubyanka: Dissonant memories of violence in the heart of Moscow. Read more ...
Join the launch of a special issue, which features Dr Margaret Comer’s article Lubyanka: Dissonant memories of violence in the heart of Moscow.
The launch of SITES OF RECKONING, a Special Issue of Memory Studies, Volume 16, No. 3, co-edited by Jennie Burnet and Natasha Zaretsky, takes place on Thursday, June 8th, 2023 7pm via Zoom. Register for the link: bit.ly/sites-2023
How do communities and nations respond to mass violence? How do we use art and culture to reckon with the past? How do these sites shape citizenship, justice, and meaning? These questions course through the experiences and lives explored in SITES OF RECKONING, with contributions featuring work about the US South, Africa, Asia, Latin America,and Europe. Articles by D. Jones, Nicola Brandt, Melissa Karp, Margaret Comer, Natasha Zaretsky, Elena Lesley, Ruth Stanford, Emilia Yang, Marita Sturken, and James E. Young.
Read more ...Aigi Heero presents at the University of Oslo conference “Trauma, Memory, and Counter-Culture. Borders and Border Transgressions in (Post-)Communist Europe”
1-2 June 2023
Going back to Ukraine. Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Novel “Eine Formalie in Kiew” (A Formality in Kyiv) Read more ...
Dr Aigi Heero presents a paper Going back to Ukraine. Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Novel “Eine Formalie in Kiew” (A Formality in Kyiv) on Thursday, June 1 at University of Oslo conference “Trauma, Memory, and Counter-Culture. Borders and Border Transgressions in (Post-)Communist Europe”. The conference explores borders and border transgressions in the context of trauma, memory, and counter-culture and aims to highlight the specific relevance of Border Studies for better understanding literature, arts, and everyday culture in repressive, transformative and (post-)war societies.
Find more information and the program here: https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/soviet-ellipses/events/conferences/program-trauma-memory-counter-culture-Oslo-2023.html
Read more ...Margaret Comer presents at the 23rd Cambridge Heritage Symposium, ‘Encountering Human Remains: Heritage Issues and Ethical Considerations”
11 May 2023
Necropolitics, Memory, and War: Contested Heritage and Security in Estonia Read more ...
On May 11, Dr Comer presents her paper ‘Necropolitics, Memory, and War: Contested Heritage and Security in Estonia’ in the session ‘European Conflictscapes and the War Dead’ (chair: Gilly Carr), at 23rd Cambridge Heritage Symposium, ‘Encountering Human Remains: Heritage Issues and Ethical Considerations”.
This paper examines the intersection of heritage, memory, politics, and national identity in contemporary Tallinn, capital of Estonia. Specifically, it analyzes sites of mass killing and mass burial related to the first and second Soviet occupations; the Nazi occupation, including the Holocaust; and the Great Patriotic War/World War II. In the aftermath of the war, memorials to Red Army losses were erected across Estonia, many including burials. Some memorials to victims of Nazism were also erected, but the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims went unmentioned. After 1991, memorials and museums commemorating victims of Soviet repression developed across Estonia, while Holocaust memorials were revamped and Red Army memorials reconsidered. The widespread ‘double genocide’ presentation of Holocaust and Soviet repression has long been criticized for downplaying crimes under fascism and eliding local collaboration, while the necropolitics of burial sites have become more urgent since the 2022 intensification of the war in Ukraine; as the ‘red monuments’ to Soviet military victory have come to signify a ‘danger’ to contemporary Estonia, the question of how to handle the sites’ human remains has arisen. This paper examines how rhetoric and decisions about these sites compares to the heritage narratives and necropolitics on display at former sites of violence such as Patarei Prison, the KGB Prison Cells, and the unmarked site of the Uus Street Holocaust massacre. How are different types of killing and death interpreted, and how are victims and perpetrators identified? How do these identifications change over time, and to what political usages are narratives of loss and death put?
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Ilya Lensky
4 May 2023
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives Read more ...
Ilya Lensky, Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives
4 May 2023, 14.15 in M213 and online
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadam 5
Please register here
Holocaust commemoration has started in Latvia immediately after the WWII, but under Soviets it has been largely inofficial, or strictly regulated by the state-imposed constraints. With the beginning of Latvia’s national movement for independance, and reestablishement of Jewish community life, Holocaust topic started more and more appearing in the public space. Jewish community members, as well as non-Jewish historians and memory activists would be organizing ceremonies, installing memorial signs, publishing articles and books.
This trend continued all through 1990s, with the major changes occuring after 1998, when Presidential Comission of Historians undertook the duty of comprehensive research of Holocaust in Latvia. This period saw also the construction of major Holocaust memorials and demarcation of Holocaust sites, often with foreign financial support. Situation has been developing in 2010s, with new/young generation developing new approaches to commemoration, sometimes developing under influence of practices, “spotted” abroad, and also basing their strive for memory more on popular culture and previous research, than on direct family or communal memory.
In our lecture we will explore different stories of commemoration, trying to outline major trends, and discussing the possible perspectives.
Ilya Lensky is the Director of the Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia
Read more ...Translating Memories Online Speaker Series Spring 2023
14 February - 4 May 2023
Featuring Kristo Nurmis, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Dina Iordanova, Ilya Lensky. Read more ...
14 February 2023, 16.00 (EET)
Kristo Nurmis, Tallinn University
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–44
14 March 2023, 16.00 (EET)
Dina Iordanova, University of St Andrews
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations
6 April 2023, 14.15 (EET)
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe
4 May 2023, 17.00 (EET)
Ilya Lensky, Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives
Kristo Nurmis
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–1944
My paper challenges the traditional Nazi-centric view of studying Baltic discourses about communism during WWII by examining the agency and self-mobilization of the Baltic people under Nazi rule and how they made sense of the first Soviet year (1940–41). Focusing on the relationship between Nazi institutions and local actors, I argue that local initiatives and discourses, sometimes contradictory to official Nazi propaganda (and sometimes inspiring the latter), played a significant role in shaping Baltic memory culture about communism. Today’s Baltic memory culture about Soviet rule, I contend, was already forged to a significant extent during the war.
Kristo Nurmis is a historian and research fellow at Tallinn University School of Humanities. He holds a PhD in Russian and Eastern European history from Stanford University and a BA and MA from the University of Tartu. He has several publications on Soviet and Nazi rule in the Baltics and is currently working on a book project on the politics of legitimacy and mass influence in Soviet- and Nazi-occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, 1939–53.
Dina Iordanova
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations
A visit to the coastal city of Izmir early in 2023 brought up memories of the centennial related to the place. In Turkey, it was marked as a day of the city’s liberation, whilst, in Greece, it was commemorated mainly through references to ethnic cleansing and catastrophe. Even Wikipedia carries two differently slanted articles on the topic, both related to the same event but not interlinked online. Occasional cultural historians and filmmakers from either country have tried to complicate the narrative for a more comprehensive understanding. A meaningful dialogue is still to materialize, though. Elsewhere, the 1922 centennial remained largely unmentioned (as has been, generally, the case with the centennial of the end of the Ottoman Empire). Indeed, the silence over the unreconciled and awkward moments in history, like this one, is deafening. In this talk, l would like to present a case study of the hushed memories related to Smyrna/Izmir and connect it to more general matters of reconciling narratives, vicious circles, and historical memory.
Dina Iordanova is Professor Emeritus of Global Cinema at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. A native of Bulgaria, she has worked internationally for three decades now and has published mainly on Balkan and East European film history as well as on the cinema of the former Soviet Union, as well as East Asia. She is also a leading specialist on global film festivals and has served on many international festival juries, both for feature and documentary. For this talk, she builds on work related to Balkan memory studies published over the last two decades.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe
One of the particular and constitutive features of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a memory region is its double experience of two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism, with Stalinism as the extreme expression of the latter. The history of these two dictatorships became entangled in the region in a unique way and resulted in a multiplicity of painful and often conflicting memories. In consequence, handling the crimes of Nazism and Communism, epitomized by the concepts of Auschwitz and Gulag, respectively, became, after the fall of Communism in 1989-1991, an immense challenge for memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. This lecture will shortly review how the societies in the region have wrestled with these issues. Additionally, it will aim to explain why the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Gulag is an object for political struggles and still constitutes a dividing line between memory cultures of the Western and Eastern members of the European Union.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In the years 2005-2017, she was the head of the Centre for European Studies in Lund, and, since 2018, she has been dean of research at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Her main research interests are nationalism, identity and memory politics in Eastern and Central Europe. She has participated in many international research projects in the field of memory studies; for example, in the years 2012-2016, she was the leader of the large research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” (financed by the EU’s COST-programme), and, in the years 2017-2020, she was co-leader of a Nordic research network on “Historical Trauma Studies”, Nordic Research Council. She is the editor and author of a number of books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish. Among them: The Twentieth Century in European Memory, Amsterdam 2017, and Disputed Memory. Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, Berlin/Boston 2016 (both edited with Tea Sindbaek Andersen), and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (New York-London 2016).
Ilya Lensky
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives
Holocaust commemoration has started in Latvia immediately after the WWII, but under Soviets it has been largely inofficial, or strictly regulated by the state-imposed constraints. With the beginning of Latvia’s national movement for independance, and reestablishement of Jewish community life, Holocaust topic started more and more appearing in the public space. Jewish community members, as well as non-Jewish historians and memory activists would be organizing ceremonies, installing memorial signs, publishing articles and books.
This trend continued all through 1990s, with the major changes occuring after 1998, when Presidential Comission of Historians undertook the duty of comprehensive research of Holocaust in Latvia. This period saw also the construction of major Holocaust memorials and demarcation of Holocaust sites, often with foreign financial support. Situation has been developing in 2010s, with new/young generation developing new approaches to commemoration, sometimes developing under influence of practices, “spotted” abroad, and also basing their strive for memory more on popular culture and previous research, than on direct family or communal memory.
In our lecture we will explore different stories of commemoration, trying to outline major trends, and discussing the possible perspectives.
Ilya Lensky is the Director of the Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia
Translating Memories Speaker Series: Prof Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
6 April 2023
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe Read more ...
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe
6 April 2023, 14.15 in M134
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadam 5
One of the particular and constitutive features of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a memory region is its double experience of two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism, with Stalinism as the extreme expression of the latter. The history of these two dictatorships became entangled in the region in a unique way and resulted in a multiplicity of painful and often conflicting memories. In consequence, handling the crimes of Nazism and Communism, epitomized by the concepts of Auschwitz and Gulag, respectively, became, after the fall of Communism in 1989-1991, an immense challenge for memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. This lecture will shortly review how the societies in the region have wrestled with these issues. Additionally, it will aim to explain why the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Gulag is an object for political struggles and still constitutes a dividing line between memory cultures of the Western and Eastern members of the European Union.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In the years 2005-2017, she was the head of the Centre for European Studies in Lund, and, since 2018, she has been dean of research at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Her main research interests are nationalism, identity and memory politics in Eastern and Central Europe. She has participated in many international research projects in the field of memory studies; for example, in the years 2012-2016, she was the leader of the large research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” (financed by the EU’s COST-programme), and, in the years 2017-2020, she was co-leader of a Nordic research network on “Historical Trauma Studies”, Nordic Research Council. She is the editor and author of a number of books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish. Among them: The Twentieth Century in European Memory, Amsterdam 2017, and Disputed Memory. Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, Berlin/Boston 2016 (both edited with Tea Sindbaek Andersen), and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (New York-London 2016).
Read more ...Dr Diana Popa presents at the BASEES annual conference
31 March 2023
“Symbolic Responsibility: Holocaust Memory and Radu Jude’s Archival Films” Read more ...
On Friday 31 March 2023, Dr Diana Popa will present her research at the BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) annual conference hosted at the University of Glasgow. Her presentation, “Symbolic Responsibility: Holocaust Memory and Radu Jude’s Archival Films”, is part of a pre-constituted panel entitled “Eastern European Processes of Remembering through Film: Documenting the Past, Archiving the Future.”
Find more information about the programme here:
https://www.myeventflo.com/event_schedlect.asp?m=4&evID=2462
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Prof Dina Iordanova
14 March 2023
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations Read more ...
Dina Iordanova, University of St Andrews
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations
14 March 2023, 16.00
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadama 5, M-648
Please register here
A visit to the coastal city of Izmir early in 2023 brought up memories of the centennial related to the place. In Turkey, it was marked as a day of the city’s liberation, whilst, in Greece, it was commemorated mainly through references to ethnic cleansing and catastrophe. Even Wikipedia carries two differently slanted articles on the topic, both related to the same event but not interlinked online. Occasional cultural historians and filmmakers from either country have tried to complicate the narrative for a more comprehensive understanding. A meaningful dialogue is still to materialize, though. Elsewhere, the 1922 centennial remained largely unmentioned (as has been, generally, the case with the centennial of the end of the Ottoman Empire). Indeed, the silence over the unreconciled and awkward moments in history, like this one, is deafening. In this talk, l would like to present a case study of the hushed memories related to Smyrna/Izmir and connect it to more general matters of reconciling narratives, vicious circles, and historical memory.
Dina Iordanova is Professor Emeritus of Global Cinema at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. A native of Bulgaria, she has worked internationally for three decades now and has published mainly on Balkan and East European film history as well as on the cinema of the former Soviet Union, as well as East Asia. She is also a leading specialist on global film festivals and has served on many international festival juries, both for feature and documentary. For this talk, she builds on work related to Balkan memory studies published over the last two decades
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Dr Kristo Nurmis
14 February 2023
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–44 Read more ...
Kristo Nurmis, Tallinn University
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–44
14 February 2023 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia, online
My paper challenges the traditional Nazi-centric view of studying Baltic discourses about communism during WWII by examining the agency and self-mobilization of the Baltic people under Nazi rule and how they made sense of the first Soviet year (1940–41). Focusing on the relationship between Nazi institutions and local actors, I argue that local initiatives and discourses, sometimes contradictory to official Nazi propaganda (and sometimes inspiring the latter), played a significant role in shaping the Baltic memory culture about communism. Today’s Baltic memory culture about Soviet rule, I contend, was forged to a significant extent already during the war.
Kristo Nurmis is a historian and research fellow at Tallinn University School of Humanities. He holds a PhD in Russian and Eastern European history from Stanford University and a BA and MA from the University of Tartu. He has several publications on Soviet and Nazi rule in the Baltics, and is currently working on a book project on the politics of legitimacy and mass influence in the Soviet and Nazi occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, 1939–53.
Read more ...Margaret Comer at the Annual Conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology
5 January 2023
Join Dr Comer at symposium 'Archaeology, Memory, and Politics in the 2020s: Changes in Methods, Narratives, and Access' Read more ...
Margaret Comer will organise and chair a symposium at the Annual Conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology entitled ‘Archaeology, Memory, and Politics in the 2020s: Changes in Methods, Narratives, and Access’ on 5 January 2023.
Abstract: Only a few years into the 2020s, paradigm shifts have taken place in the ways that archaeology and heritage studies conduct research, work with communities, and communicate narratives about the past. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sites had to rethink their methods of disseminating knowledge and narratives of the past, prompting a focus on digital and distance research and education. As the Black Lives Matter movement fostered an enormous wave of social justice activity, direct action and public debate raised pressing questions about what pasts should be remembered and memorialized, unsettling many received narratives. Amidst the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, studying and understanding how the recent past is retold and ‘weaponized’ have taken on renewed urgency. This symposium brings together global and varied case studies that seek to understand and theorize such changes, asking: how can these movements toward inclusive and equitable research and retelling of the past be sustained?
Dr Comer also presents a paper ‘Good Practice in Digital Commemoration of the Holocaust: An Analysis of COVID-Era Digital Programming at the Time of the 75th Anniversary of Liberation in Europe’, authored by Gilly Carr (University of Cambridge), Steve Cooke (Deakin University), and Margaret Comer (Tallinn University) in the above session.
Abstract: As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma, 2020 was expected to be filled with Holocaust memorial ceremonies, cultural events, and educational programming. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic began in Europe, sites that had previously emphasized the value of on-site visits and programming suddenly found themselves unable to receive visitors. Digital remembrance techniques and programming suddenly became critically important to these sites’ missions to remember the victims of the Holocaust, provide a space for memorialization, and educate the public. We identified and analyzed changes in digital remembrance at 27 Holocaust sites in the first months of the pandemic; based on this data and existing literature about digital remembrance, dark heritage, and remembrance of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma, we outline a set of creative good practices for digital remembrance at these sites.
The session is supported by Translating Memories.
On January 6, Elizabeth Anderson Comer presents the paper ‘Memory Activism, Archaeology, Reparative Heritage, and Human Rights at Catoctin Furnace – 1972 to 2023’, authored by Elizabeth Anderson Comer (Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc.) and Margaret Comer (Tallinn University) in the symposium entitled ‘Retrospective: 50 Years Of Research And Changing Narratives At Catoctin Furnace, Maryland’.
Abstract: On February 11, 1972, Catoctin Furnace was inscribed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc., was chartered on February 8, 1973. An initial cultural resources study undertaken by Contract Archaeology, Inc., of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1971, as well as the National Register nomination form, are remarkable in the omission of any mention of enslaved workers. In fact, the majority of furnace workers between 1776 and 1840 were enslaved Africans, and the furnace owners were the largest slaveholders in Frederick County. During the ensuing 50 years, archaeological, architectural, cultural landscape, forensic anthropological, aDNA, geomorphological, and related studies have focused attention on the role of enslaved and freed African American workers, fueled by the discovery of an African American cemetery in 1979 during a Phase I survey.
Read more ...Anita Pluwak presents at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS) Symposium ‘Conspiracy Theories, Denialism and Scepticism: Contrarian Epistemologies between Epistemic Fringe and Democratic Core’
1-2 December 2022
Title of the presentation is "Agency panic, theatrical plots and disaffected femininities: gender in conspiracy fiction from postsocialist Poland". Read more ...
On Friday 2 December, Dr Anita Pluwak will present her research at the symposium ‘Conspiracy Theories, Denialism and Scepticism: Contrarian Epistemologies between Epistemic Fringe and Democratic Core’, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS), University of Helsinki. The title of the presentation is “Agency panic, theatrical plots and disaffected femininities: gender in conspiracy fiction from postsocialist Poland”.
Find more information about the programme here: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/contrarian-epistemologies/programme/.
Eneken Laanes speaks at psychiatry conference War Within and Around Us
25 November 2022
Laanes talks about the cultural emergence of historical trauma and its generational transfer at the annual conference of the Psychiatry Clinic of the North Estonia Medical Centre
Margaret Comer and Diana Popa present at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Annual Convention in Chicago
10-12 November 2022
Join two of our Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena team members. Read more ...
Dr Margaret Comer will present ‘Precarity in Holocaust Remembrance in Russia: Changes in Digital Memorialization’ in the session ‘The Precarity of Holocaust Memory in the Twenty-First Century’ (Thursday 10 November, 13.00-14.45).
Dr Diana Popa will present ‘Erasing the Past? Exploring Contemporary Roma Positionality via Heritage Film’ in the session ‘Worlds in Danger: Political and Cultural Responses to Perceptions of Precarity: II’ (Saturday 12 November, 14.45-16.30)
Read more ...Bernadette Scasna presents at the International Conference of Students in Doctoral Programmes 2022 at Charles University, Prague
9 November 2022
"Artistic Narratives of the Holocaust: The Public’s Interpretation of the Film The Auschwitz Report" Read more ...
Bernadette Scasna presents at the International Conference of Students in Doctoral Programmes 2022 “IMAGINATION – INSPIRATION – INTERPRETATION” Charles University, Prague on 9th of November (15.00-15.30). The presentation “Artistic Narratives of the Holocaust: The Public’s Interpretation of the Film The Auschwitz Report” is part of the panel Art History III.
Abstract:
The efforts to create new representations of the Holocaust through various art forms such as films or literature are still ongoing. One of their tasks is to bring history closer to the newer generations and help them create an image of the past events. The case study that caught my interest is the recently released film called The Auschwitz Report (2020) directed by Peter Bebjak. The film is a co-production of Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland and Germany and it was screened not only in Europe but also reached the viewers all over the world. It brought the not-so-well-known story of two Slovak Jews who managed to escape the Holocaust to the wider public. The film helps the viewers understand the story and the characters’ feelings through many interesting artistic choices. Are these, however, enough to convey the message to the audience, or is more context needed? In this contribution I want to present my research of the film’s interpretation and reception. I focus on these two aspects in relation to the film because it is important to learn how such works shape the public’s understanding of the past. By looking closer into the reception it will be more clear what are some of the film’s attributes that are more successful (or less in favour of the audience) at representing the past and helping the audience create “prosthethic memories” (concept coined by Alison Landsberg) of a great and dark chapter of humanity’s history, the Holocaust.
Read more ...Anita Pluwak leading the Södertörn University Centre for Baltic and East European Studies Reading Seminar
3 October 2022
On Monday 3 October, 13.00-15.00, Dr Anita Pluwak will be leading the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies – CBEES / Södertörn University Reading Seminar, discussing Chapter 5 of Kateřina Lišková’s book “Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (2018)”, and Chapter 2 of Agnieszka Kościańska’s book ”Gender, Pleasure, […] Read more ...
On Monday 3 October, 13.00-15.00, Dr Anita Pluwak will be leading the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies – CBEES / Södertörn University Reading Seminar, discussing Chapter 5 of Kateřina Lišková’s book “Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (2018)”, and Chapter 2 of Agnieszka Kościańska’s book ”Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (2021)”. (Please note that participation presupposes the reading of the above-mentioned texts.)
More information here: https://www.sh.se/…/2022-10-03-overlooked-project-of…
Read more ...Translating Memories Summer School
11-15 July 2022
Translating Memories in Literature, Film, Museums, and Monuments: An Eastern European Memory Studies Summer School Read more ...
Taking place from 11-15 July 2022 in Roosta, Estonia, ‘Translating Memories in Literature, Film, Museums, and Monuments’, the Eastern European Memory Studies Summer School will combine keynote lectures, presentations, and field trips with the opportunity to present your research to a panel of academics and peers.
The ‘Translating Memories’ project focuses on how memorial forms and acts of memory are translated across, between and beyond post-socialist Eastern Europe, as well as how the arts and memory practices can potentially redraw boundaries within and beyond the region. Thus, invited experts studying media including literature, film, museums, and monuments will present on a wide range of forms, receptions, and transformations in the region from 1991 to the present day.
Possible topics include, but are certainly not restricted to, the following:
● the tensions between the local and the global in the production, circulation and reception of various acts of memory
● the aesthetic strategies and narrative and visual tropes employed by acts of memory to translate locally specific cultural and historical events for global audiences
● the intervention of aesthetic media of memory and curatorial practices in the politics of memory in Eastern Europe
● the use of archival materials and the role of archives in literature, films, museums and monuments, as well as the interplay between fact and fiction in remembering the past in these media of memory
We welcome applications from PhD students studying relevant topics in fields across the social sciences and humanities, including (but not limited to) literature, history, film studies, heritage studies, memory studies, and Slavic studies.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Zuzanna Bogumił (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Veronika Pehe (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Kevin M. F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (German Historical Institute Warsaw)
Mitja Velikonja (University of Ljubljana)
Programme
Monday, 11 July
09.30 Optional monument tour to Maarjamäe in Tallinn (meeting at Uus-Sadama 5)
13.00 Departure from Tallinn University to Roosta (meeting at Uus-Sadama 5)
14.00 Visit to the site of Klooga concentration camp
16.00 Arrival in Roosta
16.30-18.00 Keynote: Zuzanna Bogumił, Contested Past Commemorated: On the Postsecular Memory of Soviet Repressions in Russia and Eastern Europe
19.00 Dinner
Tuesday, 12 July
09.30-11.00 Panel 1: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting 1
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Keynote: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Cultural Memory: How It’s Made?
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.30 Panel 2: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting 2
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.30 Panel 3: Texts, Practices, Identities
19.00 Dinner
Film Night
Wednesday, 13 July
09.30-11.00 Keynote: Kevin Platt, Post-Socialist Post-Colonies and the Ruins of Global History
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Panel 4: Human Rights and Difficult Heritage
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00 Field trip to Haapsalu
19.00 Dinner
Thursday, 14 July
9.30-11.00 Panel 5: Visual Rhetoric and Transformation of Meaning
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Keynote: Veronika Pehe, The “Wild 1990s” on Film and Television. Remembering the Postsocialist Economic Transformations in Central Europe.
13.00-15.00 Lunch
15.00-16.30 Roundtable: The Future of Memory Studies After the War in Ukraine
Speakers: Zuzanna Bogumił, Margaret Comer, Irina Paert
19.00 Dinner
Film Night
Friday, 15 July
09.30-11.00 Panel 6: Memories of Socialist Pasts
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Keynote: Mitja Velikonja, Yugoslavia after Yugoslavia – Graffiti about Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Urbanscape
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-16.00 Travel to Tallinn
16.00 Graffiti Tour in Tallinn
Panel 1: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting I
Discussant: Kevin Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
Rezeda Lykkorpi (University of Greifswald), “Königsberg Is Not Forgotten: Exhibiting German Past in Kaliningrad Museums”
Bernadette Ščasná (Tallinn University), “Memories of the Expulsion of Germans in Czech Literature Throughout Generations”
Aleksandra Guja (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), “Contemporary Visual Stereotypes of Jews in Poland and Their Historical Sources”
Panel 2: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting II
Discussant: Zuzanna Bogumił (Institute of Archeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Alsena Kokalari (European University Institute), “Measuring Memory Museums in Central and Eastern Europe Countries: creating a context-dependent dictionary”
Kristina Zmejauskaite (Dublin City University), “A Walk Through Vilnius Now and Then: Soviet Memory in Public Spaces”
Aleksandra Kumala (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), “Unrecognized Victimhood. Homosexual Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps in the Right-Wing Media Narratives in Poland”
Panel 3: Texts, Practices, Identities
Discussant: Mitja Velikonja (University of Ljubljana)
Maria Plichta (University of Amsterdam), ““Fake Fog and Suspicious Doppelgängers: Conspiratorial Narratives around the Smoleńsk Catastrophe”
Carlos Eduardo Lesmes López (Tallinn University), “Documentary Film and the Narrativization of Memory”
Astrid Greve Kristensen (Sorbonne University), “Return and Returnees: Memory Quests”
Panel 4: Human Rights and Difficult Heritage
Discussant: Ene Kõresaar (University of Tartu)
Charley Boerman (Radboud University), “Human Rights as a Shared Past: Remembering the Holodomor Through Global Commemorative Practices”
Diãna Popova (Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga), “How to Interpret Difficult Heritage to Youth Audiences? Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research”
Hanna Aunin (Tallinn University), “Search for Recognition: Empathy Mode of Memory Transmission in In the Crosswind (2014)”
Panel 5: Visual Rhetoric and Transformation of Meaning
Discussant: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (German Historical Institute, Warsaw)
Teisi Ligi (Tallinn University), “Performative Cinematic Acts of Form in Baltic New Wave
Documentaries”
Stanislav Menzelevskyi (Indiana University Bloomington), “Chornobyl [In]Visible: Transformation of Social Meaning and Visual Rhetoric”
Aynur Rahmatova (Tallinn University), “Living Ghosts and Children’s Stories: Reading Five Films on the Spanish Civil War”
Panel 6: Memories of Socialist Pasts
Discussant: Veronika Pehe (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Daria Gordeeva (LMU, Munich), “Socialist Past as a Battlefield: How to Analyse Historical Feature Films”
Filip Mitricevic (Indiana University, Bloomington), “We Were Celebrating Pig-Slaughter”: Oral History and the Alternative Spaces Within State Holidays in Socialist Yugoslavia”
Anna Greszta (University of Amsterdam), “Memory, History and Conspiracy in Russo-Ukrainian War”
Format
Invited experts will present keynote lectures on the latest developments in theory and practice in their respective fields, as well as providing students with a variety of case studies to consider. Field trips will provide real-world examples for students to analyze through the lens of what they learn throughout the week. Finally, students will be able to present their research to their peers and instructors, providing valuable presentation experience as well as the opportunity to gain detailed feedback from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. PhD work in progress will be presented in the form of panels of 3 students, who will each give a 15-minute talk that is based on their ongoing research, relevant to the theme of the summer school. Each panel will be chaired by a senior scholar who acts as respondent and kicks off the extensive Q&A. PhD participants are expected to pre-circulate their paper to the other members of their panel and to the organizers at least 3 weeks in advance of the school. They are expected to be in full attendance for the duration of the school.
Practical Information
Organizers
The summer school is part of the project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 853385). For more information see: https://translatingmemories.tlu.ee
Where?
The summer school takes place in Roosta, Estonia: https://www.roosta.ee
The participants are accommodated in shared cottages with limited single room/mezzanine options. The transportation from Tallinn, to and from the location, is organised by the summer school.
When?
Monday 11 July 2022, 9.00 a.m. – Friday 15 July 2022, 6.00 p.m.
Costs
The registration fee for the summer school is €100. A fee waiver may be requested in case of severe financial need. This fee covers a part of accommodation and transportation to Roosta. The rest will be covered by the organisers. Applicants are responsible for the costs of their transportation to and from Tallinn and accommodation in Tallinn (if needed).
Applications
Interested applicants should contact Anita Pluwak, (anitaw@tlu.ee) with a 300-word abstract for a 15-minute paper (including title, your name, and institutional affiliation), a description of your doctoral research project (one paragraph), and a short CV (max. 1 page), as a single Word or PDF document. We still have a couple of free places and we accept application until the places are filled, but not later than 1 April 2022.
Bernadette Scasna presents at the 12th International Association for Biography and Autobiography (IABA) World Conference in Turku, Finland
17 June 2022
Title of the presentation is "Analyzing Adapted Life Stories Through Audience Reception: Adapting the Life Story of Eliška Fischmann Fábryová in the Novel Money From Hitler" Read more ...
Doctoral researcher Bernadette Scasna presents her research at the IABA World Conference “Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future” on Friday, 17th June (9:00-10:30). The title of the presentation is “Analyzing Adapted Life Stories Through Audience Reception: Adapting the Life Story of Eliška Fischmann Fábryová in the Novel Money From Hitler”.
Abstract:
In my paper I analyze the journey of Eliška Fischmann Fábryová’s life story by bringing together literary, memory, and reception studies. Fábryová was an assimilated Jew with German roots and Czech citizenship which complicated her life. She was taken to a concentration camp as a child and after the end of World War II, she found out that all her family’s property was confiscated under Beneš decree 12/1945, and her family was condemned as traitors to the Czech Republic. My paper explores how far her life story has traveled, how it has transformed, and how it is received and interpreted in the 21st century based on its loose literary adaptation in Radka Denemarková’s novel Peníze od Hitlera (Money From Hitler). In the novel, Fábryová is represented by a character called Gita Lauschmann. The novel shows that the pain, suffering, and loss do not end by signing a peace treaty, but the lives of individuals are changed and influenced by the past until their death.
The popularity, far reach, and positive reception of the novel are undeniable. I argue that the key to the success of making the story of Fábryová more known internationally is due to Denemarková’s good use of literary aesthetics and the portrayal of long-term effects of war on the lives of individuals. Furthermore, the local and global reception of this narrative brings out interesting dialogues that promote understanding of how memories of different individuals’ lives travel and how they are understood. Therefore, I analyze the local and global reception of the novel and the different interpretations of the story offered by professional reviewers as well as reviews of general readership to show how Fábryová’s story plays an important role in the memorialization of the Holocaust all around the world.
Read more ...Eneken Laanes speaks at the conference of Estonian Family Therapy Association
3 June 2022
Laanes talks about historical trauma, its cultural emergence and the debates around its generational transfer
Cultural Memory of Past Dictatorships: Narratives of Implication in a Global Perspective
12 April - 20 May 2022
An online seminar series and symposium at the University College Cork co-organised by the project Read more ...
The event comprises both a Seminar Series (12 April; 27 April; 4 May) and a Symposium (19-20 May).
Mode of Delivery: Online
Institution: University College Cork, Ireland
Seminars and Symposium are open to the public and are free of charge. However, it is compulsory to register in advance. Please find below the links to register for each of the seminars and the Symposium. Registrations for the Symposium close on 13 May 2022. Zoom links will be circulated to all registered attendees in advance of the events.
All events will be held on Zoom in the Irish Time Zone
Seminar Series
I) 12 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis) ¡Desobedientes!: Implicated Subjects, Memory, and Responsibility in Post-Dictatorship Chilean Documentaries
Registration: https://forms.gle/gGyBznfaS7qZwt1aA
II) 27 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) Implication in Commemoration: On Current Interests in Past Complicities
Registration: https://forms.gle/tAi2oyECvGMZ4ixVA
III) 4 May 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow) Remembering Cold War Pasts Across a World of Cinemas
Registration: https://forms.gle/EcgSShUYU7YKDL6E8
Symposium(19 – 20 May 2022)
University College Cork
Registration: https://forms.gle/upXgJrznTYNAyAxH9
Day 1 – Thursday 19 May 2022
9:00 – 9:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:30 – 11:00 Panel 1: Victims, Perpetrators, and Beyond
Bareez Majid (Heidelberg University) Literature and Escape: A Critical Reading of the novel City of White Musicians by the Kurdistani author Bachtyar Ali
Claudia Sandberg (University of Melbourne)The Story of a Tiger in the Bathroom: German-Jewish filmmaker Peter Lilienthal in West German Television of the 1960s
Esteban Córdoba Arroyo (University of Kitakyushu) Heroism, Messianism and Pentateuchal Remorse: Overcoming the Scheme of Victims and Perpetrators in the Collective Memory of World War 2 in Japanese Cinema (1980-2020)
11:00 – 11:15 Break
11:15 – 13:00 Panel 2: Re-Imagining Dictators and Perpetrators in Cultural Production
Rachel MagShamhráin (University College Cork) Brother Hitler: The Continuing Allure of Hitler Films in Re/unified Germany
Pooja Sancheti (The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research [IISER] Pune) Curses and Conspiracies: Reading Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Patrick Vierthaler (Kyoto University) Founding Father or Traitor to the Nation? Contested Memories of Syngman Rhee in mid-1990s South Korea
Joanne Pettitt (University of Kent) The Nazi Paradigm: Holocaust Perpetrators in Representations of the British Far-Right
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:45 Panel 3: Narrative Perspectives on the Grey Zone
Ruth Murphy (University of Cambridge) Mixing metaphors: Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’ and Maria Lugones’ ‘mestizaje
Lena Seauve (Institute for Latin American Studies [LAI] of the Free University of Berlin) On the Figure of the Bystander in Martin Kohan’s Dos Veces Junio (2002)
Jessica Marino (Carleton University) Mauricio Rosencof’s The Letters that Never Came and Uruguay’s Latest Dictatorial Rule—Framing a Redemptive Narrative of the Past through the Lens of Jewish Heritage
Stefano Bellin (University of Warwick) Being Numerous: Negotiations of Memory and Responsibility in Andrés Trapiello’s Ayer no más
15:45 – 16:00 Break
16:00 – 17:00 Panel 4: Generational Memories of Dictatorships
Mario Panico and Cristina Demaria (University of Bologna) A Perpetrator in the Family: Generational Memory and Accountability in Documentary Filmmaking
Jeanne Devautour Choi (Columbia University) The Hijos Delayed (Re-)Implication in Argentina’s Dictatorial Past
Cara Levey (University College Cork) Diasporizing Memory and Victimhoood: Challenging the ‘exilio dorado’ (Golden Exile) Myth in Tus padres volverán [Your Parents Will Come Back]and Hora Chilena [Chilean Time]
Violeta Ros (University of Zaragoza) The Portrait of Sad old Men. Domestic Ethnographies of Political Violence in Contemporary Spanish Fiction
17:45 – 18:00 Break
18:00 – 19:00 Keynote Lecture 1
Minna Johanna Niemi (The Arctic University of Norway) Western Readers and African Narratives: Towards Responsible Reading Strategies
Day 2 – Friday 20 May
9:00 – 10:00 Keynote Lecture 2
Jie-Hyun Lim (Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul) Mass Dictatorship: Vernacular Memories of Implicated Subjects and the Dictatorship from Below
10:00 – 10:30 Break
10:30 – 12:00 Panel 5: Vectors of Memory of Past Histories of Violence
Vanessa Tautter (University of Brighton) Negotiating the Nazi Past from an Implicated Position: Emotional Dynamics in Transgenerational Memory Processes in Austria
Arif Subekti, Hervina Nurullita, and Grace Leksana (Malang State University, East Java) Singing the Memories: Local Songs and Indonesia’s Collective Memory of Anti Lefitst Violence
Ethan Xi Hao Eu (National Taiwan University) The Weight of Our Sky: The May 13 Incident in a Young Adult Novel and a Webcomics Series
12:00 – 12:15 Break
12:15 – 13:45 Panel 6: Curating Implication in the Musealisation of Dictatorships
Rose Smith (Charles University – University of Groningen)Marcos Dictatorship (Re)Imagined in Museum Design
Kirsti Jõesalu and Ene Kõresaar (Tartu University) Diversification and Alternative Subjectivities in Estonian Museums: Memory of Soviet Complicity Revisited
Margaret Anderson Comer (Tallinn University)Portrayals of Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression and Violence in Moscow, Russia
13:45 – 14:45 Lunch
14:45 – 16:15 Panel 7: Filling the Gaps in Visual Representations of Dictatorships
Lucas Martins Néia (University of São Paulo) The Military Dictatorship in Brazilian TV Fiction: Approaches and Gaps
Pablo Turnes (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation – Free University of Berlin) To Dare Damnation. The problem of Vengeance and its Representation in Comics in Post-Dictatorial Argentina
Eva-Rosa Ferrand Verdejo (CY Cergy Paris University – University of Warwick) The Novísimo Cine Chileno and the Aesthetics of Trauma
16:15 – 16:30 Break
16:30 – 18:00 Panel 8: Looking at the Past, Fighting for the Future
Emanuela Buscemi (University of Monterrey) Memory Activism and Performance in the contemporary Mexican feminist movement
Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida (The Cooper Union) Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today
Peter B. Kaufman (MIT Open Learning) The Sociology of Knowledge: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
18:00 – 18:15 Break
18:15 – 19:30 Roundtable Discussion
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis)
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow)
This Symposium is generously supported by the Irish Research Council, The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC), and the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Simon Weppel
10 May 2022
"Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union Read more ...
Simon Weppel, University of Cambridge, UK
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
10 May 2022 16.00 (EET)
Simon Weppel
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
In this paper, I will demonstrate what I argue is the development of a ‘heritage temporality’ in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. On the basis of a discourse analysis of visitor guidebooks, tourist brochures, and newspaper articles relating to three Lenin museums, I trace a shift in how past, present, and future are discussed in late Soviet society.
Until the mid-1960s, these highly ideologically charged sites emphasise their educational and agitational purpose, describing themselves as ‘sources of inspiration’ for the builders of communism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, a gradual change takes place: guidebooks invoke the future ever more rarely, instead inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the historic surroundings of days gone by. Increasingly, the museums favour the restoration and preservation of an idealised past over the continuation of their erstwhile future-oriented discourses.
My paper will theorise this phenomenon and place it into the wider cultural and historical context of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s dichotomy of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ in order to investigate the preconditions for the rise of heritage as a cultural phenomenon – both in the Soviet Union and globally.
Simon Weppel is a PhD Candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge. He holds a BA from the Free University Berlin, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and has spent time at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and SciencesPo, Paris. His doctoral project studies the development of heritage preservation in the later Soviet Union.
Translating Memories Online Speaker Series Spring 2022
22 February - 10 May 2022
Featuring Mitja Velikonja, Madina Tlostanova and Simon Weppel Read more ...
Please register here
22 February 2022 16.00 (EET)
Mitja Velikonja, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s
5 April 2022 16.00 (EET)
Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University, Sweden
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence”
10 May 2022 16.00 (EET)
Simon Weppel, University of Cambridge, UK
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
Mitja Velikonja
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s
How are we to understand the Yugoslav 1980s today, how are we to write about them, paint them, record or put them into poetry, music or the stage, to sing about them; how are we to value them after the bloody tale of the 1990s? Can we still write poetry on the last Yugoslav decade after what happened in Srebrenica, Vukovar, Ahmići, Sarajevo, and the hundreds other killing fields, or is this too barbaric as well? My presentation analyses the various types of cultural and artistic reflection – i.e. the construction and the perception – upon the 1980s in socialist Yugoslavia as they have developed from its ashes since 1991. As a cultural scientist of post-Yugoslavia – and not as a historian of Yugoslavia – I will not speak about the historical 1980s but about their contemporary cultural representations; about the artistic construction and deconstruction of that decade; about the way images of the recent past are formed in today’s art and culture. My ambition is not doing historiographical trips from the post-Yugoslav present to the Yugoslav 1980s, but posing culturological questions about how the Yugoslav 1980s are present on the today’s artistic and wider cultural map.
Mitja Velikonja is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main areas of his research include contemporary Central-European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti culture, collective memory and post-socialist nostalgia. His last monographs are The Chosen Few – Aesthetics and Ideology in Football-Fan Graffiti and Street Art (Doppelhouse Press, 2021), Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe (Routledge, 2020, awarded as one of the best achievements of University of Ljubljana in the year 2020, already translated into Serbian and in translation in Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian), Rock’n’Retro – New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Slovenian Music (Sophia, 2013), Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2008), Eurosis – A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2005) and Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (TAMU Press, 2003). He is co-author of the book Celestial Yugoslavia: Interaction of Political Mythologies and Popular Culture (2012), and co-editor and co-author of books Post-Yugoslavia – New Cultural and Political Perspectives (2014) and Yugoslavia From A Historical Perspective (2017). For his achievements he received four national and one international award (Erasmus EuroMedia Award by European Society for Education and Communication, 2008). He was a full-time visiting professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2002 and 2003), at Columbia University in New York (2009 and 2014), at University of Rijeka (2015), at New York Institute in St. Petersburg (2015 and 2016), at Yale University (2020), Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia (2004/2005), and visiting researcher at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2012) and at the Remarque Institute of the New York University (2018).
Madina Tlostanova
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence”
Сoloniality of memory is one of the effective and inherently violent instruments of modernity as a repressive onto-epistemic system that effectively controls people through imposing specifically constructed and legitimized collective memory models and historical narratives and excluding or disqualifying all other forms and ways to remember. Ultimately this process may lead to extreme forms of zombification and biopolitical control disciplining and supressing the most personal, affective, and corporeal forms of memory. Societies that went through multiple and entangled experiences of politically, existentially, aesthetically, and epistemically repressive regimes such as apartheid, dictatorship, totalitarianism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and other forms of modern/colonial unfreedom, tend to come up with complex and often conflicting responses to the wiped out or severely edited memory syndrome in their post-dependence phases where they are faced with a necessity to reimagine and remake their worlds anew through processes of “re-existence”. The post-Soviet/postcolonial struggles with (de)coloniality of memory are an interesting example of such positionality. In my talk I will focus on several fictional and artistic instances of (de)coloniality of memory coming from the post-Soviet space.
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). Her research interests focus on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, feminisms of the Global South, postsocialist human condition, fiction and art, critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Centre of Contemporary Culture Tselinny, Kazakhstan, 2020) and the co-edited volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (co-edited with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Routledge, 2021). Currently she is working on an experimental mixed media book “Fictions of Unsettlement”.
Simon Weppel
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
In this paper, I will demonstrate what I argue is the development of a ‘heritage temporality’ in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. On the basis of a discourse analysis of visitor guidebooks, tourist brochures, and newspaper articles relating to three Lenin museums, I trace a shift in how past, present, and future are discussed in late Soviet society.
Until the mid-1960s, these highly ideologically charged sites emphasise their educational and agitational purpose, describing themselves as ‘sources of inspiration’ for the builders of communism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, a gradual change takes place: guidebooks invoke the future ever more rarely, instead inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the historic surroundings of days gone by. Increasingly, the museums favour the restoration and preservation of an idealised past over the continuation of their erstwhile future-oriented discourses.
My paper will theorise this phenomenon and place it into the wider cultural and historical context of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s dichotomy of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ in order to investigate the preconditions for the rise of heritage as a cultural phenomenon – both in the Soviet Union and globally.
Simon Weppel is a PhD Candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge. He holds a BA from the Free University Berlin, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and has spent time at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and SciencesPo, Paris. His doctoral project studies the development of heritage preservation in the later Soviet Union.
Mnemonic Migration: Transcultural Transmission, Translation and Circulation of Memory Across and Into Contemporary Europe
27-29 April 2022
A conference at the University of Copenhagen co-organised by the project Read more ...
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Programme
Wednesday, 27 April
14.00-14.15 Opening
14.15-16.15 Panel 1: Memory, Migration, Materiality
Chair: Eneken Laanes
Asmaa Hassaneen: From Royal Copenhagen to Kitsch Coffee Cups Wealth and Poverty in the Travelling Memories of Palestinian Immigrants in Selected Texts and Interviews
John Greaney: Samuel Beckett, Mnemonic Migration, and the Location of Cultural Memory
Thomas van de Putte: From Travelling to Travelled Memory
Hanna Meretoja: Past Worlds as Spaces of Possibility: Agency and its Limits in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (Visitation)
16.15-16.45 Break
16.45-18.15 Panel 2: Reader Positions and Mnemonic Migration
Chair: Barbara Tönquist-Plewa
Hannah Teichler: Remembering Forced Labour Migration: Recombinant Selves in Anglophone Literature
Jessica Ortner: The Puzzled Reader: Gabs of Indeterminacy in Bosnian War memory
Kaisa Kaakinen: Mediation of Local Memories to Heterogeneous Readerships – The Case of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project
Pérez Baquero: Remembering Conflict and Exile Beyond the National Frame: Max Aub’s Depiction of the Spanish Civil War From a Transnational Gaze
Thursday, 28 April
9.30-11.30 Panel 3: Representation and Circulation of Bosnian War Memories
Chair: Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
Aigi Heero: Remembering Višegrad: Memories of Childhood and War in Saša Stanišić’s Novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Dina Abazovic: Where You Come From Under Pressure: Two Novels About the Bosnian War
Fedja Wierød Borčak ”The Value of Returning Memories: How Memory Accounts by Bosnian-Herzegovinian Émigré Writers are Received in Bosna and Herzegovina”
Tea Sindbæk Andersen: Transmitting Bosnian war memories into the Danish and British public: circulation and reception of literature of the Bosnian war
11.30-12.00 Break
12.00-13.00 Keynote: Astrid Erll: Deep Histories of Mnemonic Migration: An Odyssey
13.00-14.00 Panel 4: Multidirectional Memory, Connection, Remediation
Chair: Jessica Ortner
Colin Davis: The Circulation of Memory From Buchenwald to Stalinism and the Bosnian Genocide: Semprun, Goethe and Carola Neher
Unni Langås: Two Stops on the Itinerary of Anne Frank’s Diary
Biljana Markovic: Odyssean Memory and the Refugee Crises, Tracing Transcultural and Transtemporal Mnemonic Relationality in Poetry
Silvia Riva: Camp Antechambers and Dress Rehearsals: Memories of “Minor” Genocides of the Twentieth Century in Contemporary French-Language Fiction
16.00-16.30 Break
16.30-18.30 Panel 5: Post-Socialist Memory in New Contexts
Chair: Tine Rosen
Eneken Laanes: Katja Petrowskaja’s Translational Poetics of Memory
Anja Tippner “People Would Close Their Eyes to Think Back to a Past and Tell Untruths About It Until They Were True”: Literature After Memory Studies and Migratory Aesthetics
Anita Pluwak: Red Princess, Black Widow and Other Stories: Popular Reception of Political (Auto)biographies from Postsocialist Poland
Jan Schwarz The Historical Novel as World Literature of Memory in Contemporary Europe: Olga Tokarczuk’s Kiegi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob, 2014)
Friday, 29 April
9.30-11.30 Panel 6: Translation and Circulation
Chair: Fedja Wierød Borčak
Mónika Dánél: Shared Memories – Remediation as Accented Reading
Una Tanović: On Prosthetic Memories and Phantom Limbs: Self-Translation and Pseudotranslation in Bekim Sejranović’s Tvoj sin Huckleberry Finn/Din sønn, Huckleberry Finn (2015) and Alen Mešković’s Ukulele jam (2011)
Stijn Vervaet: Translating Memories of the Bosnian War: Translingual Writers as Memory Brokers
Jakob Lothe:Variants of Memory and Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
11.30-12.00 Break
12.00-13.00 Keynote: Rebecca Walkowitz: Additional Languages: The Translated Fiction of Lahiri and Luiselli
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-16.00 Panel 7 Iceland-Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery
Chair: Tea Sindbæk Andersen
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir: Iceland – Ireland: Transnational Memories of Crises in Álfrún Gunnlaugsdóttir’s Siglingin um síkin and Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth
Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir: The Past That Never Was: Sjón and Jamie O’Neill’s Queer Historical Fiction
Fionnuala Dillane: Crimes on the Atlantic Periphery: Irish and Icelandic Writings From the Edge
16.00-17.00 Closing Round Table
Keynotes:
Astrid Erll (Goethe University Frankfurt / The Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform)
Deep Histories of Mnemonic Migration: An Odyssey
The migration of people and of mnemonic mediations is not just a phenomenon of our present age, but it has its own deep (and largely unexplored) histories. My lecture addresses this longue durée of mnemonic migration, using as an example the Homeric odyssey – both an origin narrative and perpetual medium of travelling memory.
Old narratives such as the odyssey pose a variety of challenges to memory studies: How can we find ways to trace their narrative agency and afterlives across thousands of years, multiple languages and cultures, minds and media?
As we are now living in an age of conspiracy myths, rampant populism, and Putin’s war, I chose to focus not so much on the rich repertoire of cosmopolitan memories that were enabled by and articulated with the odyssey (from James Joyce’s Ulysses to current discourses about refugees). Instead, I will discuss the logic of propaganda, fake news, biased and damaging usages of ‘odyssean memory’. My examples range all the way from medieval slander to Holocaust denial, ‘memory abuse in translation’, and present-day identitarianism. At the heart of my lecture is therefore the pressing question: What makes some kinds of mnemonic migration ‘constructive’ and ‘productive’ and others ‘false’ and ‘abusive’? And how can we describe the formative role of longue durée memory in such processes?
Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She has worked on German, British, South Asian, American, and South African literatures and media cultures. Her research interests include literary history (focus on 19th-21st centuries), media history (focus on film and photography), English and comparative literature, cultural theory, media theory, narratology, transcultural studies and – last not least – memory studies.
Astrid Erll is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (with A. Nünning, De Gruyter, since 2004) and co-editor of A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (with A. Nünning, 2010) and Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (with A. Rigney, 2009). More recently, she published with Ann Rigney Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe(Image & Narrative, 2017) and Cultural Memory after the Transnational Turn (Memory Studies, 2018). She is author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave 2011), an introduction to memory studies which was originally published in German as Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2005, 3rd ed. 2017) and has also been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Polish.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers University)
Additional Languages: The Translated Fiction of Lahiri and Luiselli
Contemporary migrant writers know that there is no civic hospitality without multilingualism. However, writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Valeria Luiselli are approaching this axiom in unprecedented ways. Instead of expanding original languages, they are creating intralingual and multilingual works that operate in secondary, translated, or additional tongues. They approach the the histories of undocumented children at the U.S. border or immigrant service workers by refusing to establish a single, collective language for their characters, their settings, or their writing. This lecture dilates out from these examples to argue that we need to shift from a paradigm of “foreign languages” to a paradigm of “additional languages.” We need a more robust engagement with the languages that operate both across and within literary histories.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Dean of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. She the author or editor of 10 books and has delivered more than 80 distinguished lectures in the fields of modernism, contemporary fiction, and world literature in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America. Her book Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) received Honorable Mention for the first annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the MLA and has recently been published in Japanese in a born-translated edition that includes a new essay and an interview with the translators. Her current book project, “Future Reading,” focuses a new generation of migrant novelists, essayists, and nonfiction fabulists who are changing how we encounter world languages and how we use languages to create inclusive communities. An essay taken from the first chapter, “On Not Knowing,” appeared in New Literary History in 2020.A second essay from that project, “Less Than One Language,” appeared in SubStance in 2021, in a special issue on “The Postlingual Turn,” which she co-edited with yasser elhariry.
Organiser:
Mnemonic Migration: Transnational Circulation and Reception of Wartime Memories in post-Yugoslav Migrant Literature (Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2019–2022, Jessica Ortner, Tea Sindbæk Andersen)
Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena (ERC, Grant Number 853385, 2020–2024, project leader Eneken Laanes)
Call for Papers (closed)
This conference aims to explore how memories travel through the aesthetic medium of literature and are translated into new local communities of remembering. The conference concentrates on the travel of memories (Erll 2011) within or into the cultural, geographical and symbolic boundaries of Europe, perhaps fostering new knowledge and attention to events that are otherwise marginalized in a Westernized perspective on the European past and identity.According to Ann Rigney and Astrid Erll (2009), fictional literature is a significant medium of cultural memory that has the ability of “sparking public debates on historical topics that had hitherto been marginalized or forgotten.” This conference looks at transcultural memory formations that are generated: 1) by the mobility of people across or into Europe and 2) by the production of “transcultural memorial forms” (Laanes 2021) that translate experiences to other geographic arenas.
According to Erll (2011), migrants can be seen as carriers of memory, understood as “individuals who share in collective images and narratives of the past.” By expressing their mnemonic displacement – that is, their disorientation in the mnemonic framework of their host country together with their contrasting memories – migrant literature contributes to setting the agenda for future collective remembrance. This conference shall explore how this activity, which we would like to think of as mnemonic migration, speaks to the (re)construction of shared memories in Europe and/or its countries and regions. Furthermore, we are interested in questioning which “transcultural memorial forms” may be used to “culturally translate experiences in order to make them known and intelligible to others,” thus making memories travel (Laanes 2021).
Crucially, the successful travel of memories depends on reception by members of a mnemonic community. Therefore, this conference is also concerned with the reception and recirculation of transcultural memories, asking if novels, due to the “transformative power of the arts and their capacity to mobilize individuals through imagination and affect” (Rigney 2014), may forge what Alison Landsberg (2004) has called prosthetic memory: that is, a deep-felt and empathetic connection to events one has not lived through. We are keen to explore how mediations of memory circulate, how they are received, and if and how they may develop into what we could think of as prosthetic memories in various European contexts, perhaps contributing to new memory canons within Europe.
We welcome papers that consider, but are not limited to, any of the following issues:
• Memory literature by authors who have migrated to or within Europe
• Reception and prosthetic memory
• World literature of memory in a European perspective
• Travelling memory
• Methodological considerations of studying transcultural memory in literature
• Methodological considerations of studying circulation, reception and prosthetic memory
TÜHI Ukraine Talks: Margaret Comer
27 April 2022
'Politics, Identity, Grief: Memorialization of Twentieth-Century Violence in Contemporary Ukraine' Read more ...
Margaret Comer presents the online talk ‘Politics, Identity, Grief: Memorialization of Twentieth-Century Violence in Contemporary Ukraine’ as part of the TÜHI Ukraine Talks on 27 April 2022, 17.00.
Margaret Comer at the symposium “Responsibility to Remember: Issues and Perspectives”
22 April 2022
Dark Heritage in Tallinn: Analyzing Sites of Soviet and Nazi Repression Read more ...
15.00, Tallinn University, room A-121, Narva mnt 25, Tallinn
Dr Comer present the paper “Dark Heritage in Tallinn: Analyzing Sites of Soviet and Nazi Repression” at the symposium organised by Baltic-German University Liaison Office
Translating Memories Speaker Series: prof Madina Tlostanova
5 April 2022
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence” Read more ...
Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University, Sweden
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence”
5 April 2022 16.00 (Tallinn time)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please join us on Zoom here
Сoloniality of memory is one of the effective and inherently violent instruments of modernity as a repressive onto-epistemic system that effectively controls people through imposing specifically constructed and legitimized collective memory models and historical narratives and excluding or disqualifying all other forms and ways to remember. Ultimately this process may lead to extreme forms of zombification and biopolitical control disciplining and supressing the most personal, affective, and corporeal forms of memory. Societies that went through multiple and entangled experiences of politically, existentially, aesthetically, and epistemically repressive regimes such as apartheid, dictatorship, totalitarianism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and other forms of modern/colonial unfreedom, tend to come up with complex and often conflicting responses to the wiped out or severely edited memory syndrome in their post-dependence phases where they are faced with a necessity to reimagine and remake their worlds anew through processes of “re-existence”. The post-Soviet/postcolonial struggles with (de)coloniality of memory are an interesting example of such positionality. In my talk I will focus on several fictional and artistic instances of (de)coloniality of memory coming from the post-Soviet space.
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). Her research interests focus on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, feminisms of the Global South, postsocialist human condition, fiction and art, critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Centre of Contemporary Culture Tselinny, Kazakhstan, 2020) and the co-edited volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (co-edited with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Routledge, 2021). Currently she is working on an experimental mixed media book “Fictions of Unsettlement”
Diana Popa organised panel at the 2022 Society For Cinema and Media Studies conference
31 March - 3 April 2022
"Female Historical Cinema and the Workings of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe" Read more ...
Join Diana Popa organised panel “Female Historical Cinema and the Workings of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe” at the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Chicago, Il, March 31—April 3 (online). Find more information here.
Historical cinema is an important part of the Central and Eastern European filmic landscape (Dina Iordanova). It serves as an instrument for the (re)construction of national identities (Thomas Elsaesser) and a vehicle for the politics of memory (Aleida Assmann, Astrid Erll). Regardless of whether monumental or critical (Nietzsche), the CEE historical cinemas used to be created by men and they primarily took into account the male perception of the past, i.e. focused on Great Men and landmark events. Told from the perspective of subordinate nations, the CEE historical cinemas often became part of the subordinate chain, valorizing subjugated nations but at the same time avoiding social history and rejecting the perspective of women or ethnic minorities. Thus, the productions that break this pattern have not been thoroughly researched.
In our panel, we focus on historical cinema in Central and Eastern Europe that is made by women (both directing and non-directing roles), which focuses on female protagonists and hence constructs a female perspective across a variety of historical sub-genres (epics, melodramas, biopics, documentaries, Holocaust films). The papers in this panel seek to answer the following questions: How do historical films made by or with the significant contribution of women negotiate the boundaries between individual and collective memory? To what extent the “female” use of visual patterns and templates contributes to obscuring or uncovering forgotten histories (for example, the Romani genocide during the Second World War)? How does a focus on women’s personal memories provide new understandings of Soviet style repression? What does a focus on non-directing creative female contributions reveal in relation to established historical genres such as the epic, the biopic or the Holocaust film – given that the genre is among the least accessible to female crew?
In the films we have selected – Papusza, Mészáros’s Diary films, Aurora Borealis, Moromeții – The Edge of Time, Eternal Winter, “I Don’t Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians”– history that shapes and determines the lives of individuals and nations in this part of Europe is captured through the prism of an individual immersed in it, who tries to negotiate herself and her place in community. The history experienced and recalled by women is marked with/by the (un)consciousness of its situatedness, by the perception from a specific, individual perspective, through the prism of personal experiences. The trauma that is often the result of these experiences translates into the way history is presented. Individual memories are intertwined with visual patterns and templates elaborated on the level of culture – and enabled by the female situatedness of filmmakers and film protagonists alike.
CHAIR: Diana Popa (Tallinn University)
RESPONDENT: Anikó Imre (University of Southern California)
PARTICIPANTS:
Elżbieta Durys (University of Warsaw) “Reclaiming Minority Female Past in Polish Contemporary Historical Cinema: Papusza by Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze”
Diana Popa (Tallinn University) “Ghosts of the Past: Memory and Political Repression in Márta Mészáros’s Diary for my Children (1982)”
Andrea Virginás (Sapientia University Cluj-Napoca) “Restorative memory work in a female mode? Eastern European historical films and female creative involvement”
This panel is sponsored by the ERC funded project “Translating Memories. The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena”.
Read more ...Anita Pluwak gives a talk at Lund University about conspiracy fiction and postsocialist culture of suspicion
24 March 2022
"Staging the stolen transition: conspiracy fiction and postsocialism's culture of suspicion" Read more ...
Anita Pluwak gives a talk “Staging the stolen transition: conspiracy fiction and postsocialism’s culture of suspicion” at Lund University on March 24th. The talk is part of research seminars and guest lectures in European, East and Central European and Russian Studies, Spring 2022 at Lund University’s Centre for Languages and Literature.
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: prof Mitja Velikonja
22 February 2022
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s Read more ...
Mitja Velikonja, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s
22 February 2022 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please join us on Zoom here
How are we to understand the Yugoslav 1980s today, how are we to write about them, paint them, record or put them into poetry, music or the stage, to sing about them; how are we to value them after the bloody tale of the 1990s? Can we still write poetry on the last Yugoslav decade after what happened in Srebrenica, Vukovar, Ahmići, Sarajevo, and the hundreds other killing fields, or is this too barbaric as well? My presentation analyses the various types of cultural and artistic reflection – i.e. the construction and the perception – upon the 1980s in socialist Yugoslavia as they have developed from its ashes since 1991. As a cultural scientist of post-Yugoslavia – and not as a historian of Yugoslavia – I will not speak about the historical 1980s but about their contemporary cultural representations; about the artistic construction and deconstruction of that decade; about the way images of the recent past are formed in today’s art and culture. My ambition is not doing historiographical trips from the post-Yugoslav present to the Yugoslav 1980s, but posing culturological questions about how the Yugoslav 1980s are present on the today’s artistic and wider cultural map.
Mitja Velikonja is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main areas of his research include contemporary Central-European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti culture, collective memory and post-socialist nostalgia. His last monographs are The Chosen Few – Aesthetics and Ideology in Football-Fan Graffiti and Street Art (Doppelhouse Press, 2021), Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe (Routledge, 2020, awarded as one of the best achievements of University of Ljubljana in the year 2020, already translated into Serbian and in translation in Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian), Rock’n’Retro – New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Slovenian Music (Sophia, 2013), Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2008), Eurosis – A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2005) and Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (TAMU Press, 2003). He is co-author of the book Celestial Yugoslavia: Interaction of Political Mythologies and Popular Culture (2012), and co-editor and co-author of books Post-Yugoslavia – New Cultural and Political Perspectives (2014) and Yugoslavia From A Historical Perspective (2017). For his achievements he received four national and one international award (Erasmus EuroMedia Award by European Society for Education and Communication, 2008). He was a full-time visiting professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2002 and 2003), at Columbia University in New York (2009 and 2014), at University of Rijeka (2015), at New York Institute in St. Petersburg (2015 and 2016), at Yale University (2020), Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia (2004/2005), and visiting researcher at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2012) and at the Remarque Institute of the New York University (2018).
Anita Pluwak gives a talk at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm
21 February 2022
"Staging the stolen transition: conspiracy and collusion in postsocialist crime fiction" Read more ...
Anita Pluwak gives a talk at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University about conspiracy fiction on February 21st. The talk is entitled “Staging the stolen transition: conspiracy and collusion in postsocialist crime fiction” and is part of CBEES Advanced Seminars
Read more ...Comer gives a paper at the annual Society for Historical Archaeology Conference
8 January 2022
"Weaponizing the Heritage of Violence: Competing Memories at Mass Graves in Russia and Ukraine" Read more ...
Margaret Comer presents her paper “Weaponizing the Heritage of Violence: Competing Memories at Mass Graves in Russia and Ukraine” at the annual Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Presentation is part of a session entitled “Heritage and Public Archaeology”.
Read more ...Panel Mediating the Memory of the Communist Past in Contemporary East Central European Cinemas at ASEEES 2021
3 December 2021
Join us for the panel organised by Diana Popa Read more ...
3 Dec 10.00-11:45 CST, Virtual Convention, VR 5
In the context of the global resurgence of authoritarian, right wing tendencies, this panel proposes to map changes in the memory discourses about the East Central European past by analysing the aesthetic and narrative strategies that historical films from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania employ in order to respond to the changing needs of the present. The panel seeks to explore the memory of the communist past that these films reconstruct in relation to (a) official discourses about the past; (b) their popularity and/or recognition at global, regional and national levels; c) oppositional discourses of victims and perpetrators. The aim is to offer a nuanced understanding of how these films work within local/ global memory discourses and how these, in turn, affect their reception at local and/ or global level.
Chair: Diana Popa, Tallinn University
Discussant: Katarína Misikova, Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava
Speakers:
Elzbieta Durys, University of Warsaw
‘Reclaiming Past’ and ‘Filling in the Blank Spots’: Prevailing Elements in Contemporary Polish Historical Cinema
Janka Dudková, Institute of Theatre and Film Research, CRA, SAS
From the Rhetorics of ‘Glasnost’ to Contemporary ‘Anticommunism’ in Slovak Film
Andrea Virginás, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
21st Century Historical Films and Small National Collective Memory: Examples from Hungary and Romania
Diana Popa, Tallinn University
Memory and the Communist Past in Romanian Historical Films: From Revolutionary Uncertainty to Hopeless Didacticism
Translating Memories Speaker Series: Dr Mischa Gabowitsch
30 November 2021
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities Read more ...
Mischa Gabowitsch, Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities
30 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please register here
The rise of expressions of regret and atonement for past atrocities has been described as the triumph of an international norm, and recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in the different actors and processes—sub-, trans-, or supra-national—that contribute to the diffusion of that norm. Yet in most cases, the idea is articulated not simply as the application of a universal norm to a particular national or local context, but by analogy. Other countries are held up as examples, as models to emulate or as unreachable gold standards of atonement. Germany in particular is often referred to as a master atoner, a country with an exemplary track record of “coming to terms with its past” that holds valuable lessons for other nations.
Based on a major volume I edited, in this talk I will explore the effects and implications of atoning by analogy. I distinguish between four different ideal-typical uses of foreign models in debates about atonement: as a springboard, a yardstick, a foil, or a screen, and illustrate them with examples from around the world before focusing more specifically on the role that references to the “German model” have played in a Soviet and post-Soviet Russian context.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a historian and sociologist based at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from Oxford and a PhD from the School of Advanced Social Studies (EHESS) in Paris, and is an alumnus fellow of the Princeton University Society of Fellows and past editor-in-chief of the Russian journals NZ and Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. His book publications in English are Protest in Putin’s Russia and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities. He has also edited several books in Russian and German on war memory and commemoration in Russia and beyond. At present he is working on a history of Soviet war memorials as well as a book on Victory Day celebrations since 1945, and also has various projects related to pragmatic sociology and specifically the sociology of regimes of engagement
Translating Memories Online Speaker Series Autumn 2021
19 October - 30 November 2021
Featuring Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius, Maria Kobielska and Mischa Gabowitsch, Read more ...
19 October 2021 16.00 (EEST)
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape
9 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition
30 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Mischa Gabowitsch, Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape
In this talk, I will present an article that has recently been accepted for publication in the History & Memory journal. The article examines the palimpsestic memoryscape of Białystok, the largest city in northeast Poland, to illuminate the ongoing struggle in contemporary Poland between two memory regimes: the declarative “multiculturalism” and the submerged racism. It employs the concept of “heterotopia” as a theoretical device and walking as a method to study the Jewish Heritage Trail (JHT) as an attempt to recover the memory of bygone multiethnicity and, in doing so, to mint a new “multicultural” brand for the city. By analyzing the post-Jewish spaces located on the JHT—all of which have been appropriated, erased, and/or marginalized—the article shows that this new “multicultural” memory regime is shot through with racism, because it reproduces the inequalities and segregation that structured inter-ethnic relationships in the past.
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius is Postdoctoral Researcher (Core Fellow) in media and communication at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Having previously done research on ethical trade communication, she is currently working on a project concerning mediated racism and nationalism in Poland. Her articles have been published in journals across disciplines such as Nations and Nationalism, Globalizations, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, and Media and Communication.
Maria Kobielska
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition
In the talk, I explore the potential of the Polish past being exhibited in the global context, drawing on my research on the Polish museum boom in the 21st century. In recent years, historical museums have gained particular attention in Poland; multiple newly founded or rearranged institutions, offering spectacular exhibitions, powerfully influence visions of the past. “New museums” occupy prominent position within contemporary Polish memory culture and thus can serve as touchstones of its dynamics. As visual, performative and emotional memory media, museum exhibitions promise to transcend the boundaries of a single national perspective and language in order to make regional past intelligible in the global context. Museum creators frequently express their aspirations to do so. For instance, Paweł Machcewicz, the first director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, elaborates on the figure of a “tourist from Portugal” as an imaginary visitor of the exhibition, used in the course of his team’s work to communicate regional and Polish memory of the war in an internationally comprehensible way (Machcewicz 2017). Leading museums of the 21st century often aim at both domestic and international audiences and consequently struggle to simultaneously perform divergent, if not conflicting, tasks. This has so often been a bone of contention: how should museums prioritise? On the one hand, there is a risk of self-colonisation, when local memory is reduced to an internationally recognisable form. On the other, when celebrating local memory is valued over contextualising and communicating, it is probable that ressentiment rather than empowerment will follow. In the course of the talk I will analyse diverse museum strategies designed to neutralise both risks, taking into account prevalent historical policies and codes of memory culture. I will focus on Polish museums that are most popular among the international audience, like the Warsaw Rising Museum and the Museum of the Second World War, but also explore lesser-known cases that can inspire “curatorial dreaming” (Butler&Lehrer 2016) about new forms of citizenship and community.
Maria Kobielska, PhD, is a memory scholar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures (JU), of the Memory Studies Association, and of the Polish Association of Cultural Studies. She has written on contemporary Polish literature and culture in the context of memory and politics. Her most recent book discusses Polish memory culture in the 21st century (Polska kultura pamięci: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny, 2016) and she is currently working on a research project that focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums.
Mischa Gabowitsch
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities
The rise of expressions of regret and atonement for past atrocities has been described as the triumph of an international norm, and recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in the different actors and processes—sub-, trans-, or supra-national—that contribute to the diffusion of that norm. Yet in most cases, the idea is articulated not simply as the application of a universal norm to a particular national or local context, but by analogy. Other countries are held up as examples, as models to emulate or as unreachable gold standards of atonement. Germany in particular is often referred to as a master atoner, a country with an exemplary track record of “coming to terms with its past” that holds valuable lessons for other nations.
Based on a major volume I edited, in this talk I will explore the effects and implications of atoning by analogy. I distinguish between four different ideal-typical uses of foreign models in debates about atonement: as a springboard, a yardstick, a foil, or a screen, and illustrate them with examples from around the world before focusing more specifically on the role that references to the “German model” have played in a Soviet and post-Soviet Russian context.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a historian and sociologist based at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from Oxford and a PhD from the School of Advanced Social Studies (EHESS) in Paris, and is an alumnus fellow of the Princeton University Society of Fellows and past editor-in-chief of the Russian journals NZ and Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. His book publications in English are Protest in Putin’s Russia and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities. He has also edited several books in Russian and German on war memory and commemoration in Russia and beyond. At present he is working on a history of Soviet war memorials as well as a book on Victory Day celebrations since 1945, and also has various projects related to pragmatic sociology and specifically the sociology of regimes of engagement.
Translating Memories Speaker Series: Dr Maria Kobielska
9 November 2021
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition Read more ...
Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition
9 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please register here
In the talk, I explore the potential of the Polish past being exhibited in the global context, drawing on my research on the Polish museum boom in the 21st century. In recent years, historical museums have gained particular attention in Poland; multiple newly founded or rearranged institutions, offering spectacular exhibitions, powerfully influence visions of the past. “New museums” occupy prominent position within contemporary Polish memory culture and thus can serve as touchstones of its dynamics. As visual, performative and emotional memory media, museum exhibitions promise to transcend the boundaries of a single national perspective and language in order to make regional past intelligible in the global context. Museum creators frequently express their aspirations to do so. For instance, Paweł Machcewicz, the first director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, elaborates on the figure of a “tourist from Portugal” as an imaginary visitor of the exhibition, used in the course of his team’s work to communicate regional and Polish memory of the war in an internationally comprehensible way (Machcewicz 2017). Leading museums of the 21st century often aim at both domestic and international audiences and consequently struggle to simultaneously perform divergent, if not conflicting, tasks. This has so often been a bone of contention: how should museums prioritise? On the one hand, there is a risk of self-colonisation, when local memory is reduced to an internationally recognisable form. On the other, when celebrating local memory is valued over contextualising and communicating, it is probable that ressentiment rather than empowerment will follow. In the course of the talk I will analyse diverse museum strategies designed to neutralise both risks, taking into account prevalent historical policies and codes of memory culture. I will focus on Polish museums that are most popular among the international audience, like the Warsaw Rising Museum and the Museum of the Second World War, but also explore lesser-known cases that can inspire “curatorial dreaming” (Butler&Lehrer 2016) about new forms of citizenship and community.
Maria Kobielska, PhD, is a memory scholar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures (JU), of the Memory Studies Association, and of the Polish Association of Cultural Studies. She has written on contemporary Polish literature and culture in the context of memory and politics. Her most recent book discusses Polish memory culture in the 21st century (Polska kultura pamięci: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny, 2016) and she is currently working on a research project that focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums.
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Dr Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius
19 October 2021
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape Read more ...
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape
19 October 2021 16.00 (EEST)
Tallinn University (online)
Please register here
In this talk, I will present an article that has recently been accepted for publication in the History & Memory journal. The article examines the palimpsestic memoryscape of Białystok, the largest city in northeast Poland, to illuminate the ongoing struggle in contemporary Poland between two memory regimes: the declarative “multiculturalism” and the submerged racism. It employs the concept of “heterotopia” as a theoretical device and walking as a method to study the Jewish Heritage Trail (JHT) as an attempt to recover the memory of bygone multiethnicity and, in doing so, to mint a new “multicultural” brand for the city. By analyzing the post-Jewish spaces located on the JHT—all of which have been appropriated, erased, and/or marginalized—the article shows that this new “multicultural” memory regime is shot through with racism, because it reproduces the inequalities and segregation that structured inter-ethnic relationships in the past.
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius is Postdoctoral Researcher (Core Fellow) in media and communication at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Having previously done research on ethical trade communication, she is currently working on a project concerning mediated racism and nationalism in Poland. Her articles have been published in journals across disciplines such as Nations and Nationalism, Globalizations, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, and Media and Communication.
Margaret Comer presents her work at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre
14 October 2021
Join Margaret for her talk "Translating Memories: Researching the Heritage of Victimhood, Perpetration, and Implication in Post-Soviet States". Read more ...
Join Margaret Comer for her talk “Translating Memories: Researching the Heritage of Victimhood, Perpetration, and
Implication in Post-Soviet States” on Thursday 14 October, 1-2pm. To receive a link to this event please register at: https://tinyurl.com/54kppemw
After completing my PhD at Cambridge, I moved to Tallinn University as a member of ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in Global Perspective’. This is an interdisciplinary project within the realm of cultural theory, and I work alongside scholars from across Europe who study literature and film as well as memory cultures. Due to the pandemic, I have been unable to travel to Russia or Ukraine for fieldwork as planned. However, I have visited sites of Nazi or Soviet violence in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and begun to critically analyse the competing, weaponized depictions of victimhood and perpetration that I observed across this wide variety of sites, including memorial museums, concentration camps, killing sites, and prisons. In terms of theory, I have explored the presence of the ‘implicated subject’, as theorized by Michael Rothberg, at sites of Soviet mass repression in Russia. This talk will present an overview of my work-in-progress on sites displaying victimhood and perpetration across Russia and the Baltic states. The presentation will also include short reflections on transitioning from the PhD to a postdoc.
Read more ...Laanes in MSA 2021 Warsaw Sub-plenary How Memory Mediates the Past in History and in Literature
9 July 2021
Laanes to discuss responsibility, redemption and the late Soviet subject in Julian Barnes’s novel The Noise of Time Read more ...
Sub-plenary Session 1: How Memory Mediates the Past in History and in Literature
14-16 (GMT+2)
Chair: Tea Sindbaek Andersen, University of Copenhagen
Discussants:
Astrid Erll, Goethe University Frankfurt
Hans Ruin, Department of Culture and Learning, Södertörn University
Speakers:
Julie Hansen, Uppsala University
Fiction as a Grey Zone between History and Memory
Patrick Hutton, University of Vermont
The Celebrity of Walter Benjamin
Siobhan Kattago, University of Tartu
Odysseus and the Bard: Bridging the Gap between Experience and Narrative
Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University
Julian Barnes’s Dmitri Shostakovich: Responsibility and Redemption
Panel Victims, Perpetrators, Implicated Subjects in Central and Eastern Europe at MSA 2021 Warsaw
8 July 2021
Join us for the panel organised by our project Read more ...
H18: Victims, Perpetrators and Implicated Subjects in Central and Eastern Europe
8 July 11-13 (GMT+2)
Many scholars in memory studies have drawn attention to the inadequacy of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy for understanding political violence in various historical situation and even more so in remembering the violence by subsequent generations. Eastern Europe is a case in point here. Soviet repressions in Russia often turned perpetrators of the first wave of repressions into the victims of the next (Etkind 2013). During WWII in East Central Europe, Ukraine and the Baltic states the victims of one occupying regime sometimes became the perpetrators of the next. During the socialist regime in Eastern Europe most of people did not occupy neither of these two positions, but still suffered and/or were complicit with autoritarian regimes. How to describe the convergence of these subject positions in relations to violence?
And what are the forms of implication (Rothberg 2019) of contemporary generations of Eastern Europeans in this past? More often than not we see the national states in the region externalise violence and identify with victims of past violence without bringing up the question of responsibility for collaboration and complicity. How to describe the implicated subjects in Eastern Europe and what are the ways in which they are implicated in the past of the region?
The panel seeks answers to these questions by exploring commemorative practices and aesthetic media of memory that enable to forge subject positions that are resisted and made difficult to imagine or to adopt by the politics of memory in different contexts in Eastern Europe.
Chair:
Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University
Discussant:
Ljiljana Radonić, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History
Speakers:
Margaret Comer, Tallinn University
Portraying Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression in Moscow
Daria Mattingly, University of Cambridge
Implicated Subjects of the Holodomor
Diana Popa, Tallinn University
Spectacular Provocations: Implicated Spectators in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Historical Films
Margaret Comer presents at the Fifth Annual Tartu Conference on Russian and East European Studies
8 June 2021
Memorials, Museums, and Memorial Museums: Remembering Mass Repression in Contemporary Moscow
Workshop Victims, Perpetrators, Implicated Subjects in Central and Eastern Europe
3-4 June 2021
Project workshop with a public keynote lecture by Ljiljana Radonić Read more ...
Thursday, 3 June (open to public)
16.00 – Online keynote address
“Perpetrators and Collaborators in Post-Socialist Memorial Museums in the Era of Victimhood” (Ljiljana Radonić, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna)
Please register here
17.30 – Virtual cocktail hour
Friday, 4 June (open only to the presenting participants)
10.00 – Introduction (Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University)
10.30 – Session 1: Available Subject Positions in Museums and Memorials
“Diversification and Alternative Subject Positions: On Museological Representation of Communism in Estonia” (Ene Kõresaar and Kirsti Jõesalu, University of Tartu)
“Portraying Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression in Moscow” (Margaret Comer, Tallinn University)
11:30 – Coffee Break
11:45 – Session 2: Rethinking the Implicated Subject
“Man-Made Famine Without Perpetrators? To the Question of the Rank-and-File Perpetrators in the Holodomor Studies” (Daria Mattingly, University of Cambridge)
“Perpetrator and/or Victim – Family History and the Totalitarian Condition in Stepanova and Lebedev” (Anja Tippner, University of Hamburg)
12.45 – Lunch
14.00 – Session 3: The Implicated Subject in Film
“Spectacular Provocation: Implicated Spectators in I Do Not Care if We go Down in History as Barbarians”(Diana Popa, Tallinn University)
“The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Perpetrator Memory in two Lithuanian Films: Purple Mist (2019) and Izaokas (2019)” (Violeta Davoliute, Vilnius University)
15:00 – Coffee Break
15:15 – Session 4: General Discussion and Workshopping
16:00 – End of the Workshop
Many scholars in memory studies have drawn attention to the inadequacy of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy for understanding political violence in various historical situation and even more so in remembering the violence by subsequent generations. Eastern Europe is a case in point here. Soviet repressions in Russia often turned perpetrators of the first wave of repressions into the victims of the next (Etkind 2013). During WWII in East Central Europe, Ukraine and the Baltic states the victims of one occupying regime sometimes became the perpetrators of the next. During the socialist regime in Eastern Europe most of people did not occupy neither of these two positions, but still suffered and/or were complicit with autoritarian regimes. How to describe the convergence of these subject positions in relations to violence?
And what are the forms of implication (Rothberg 2019) of contemporary generations of Eastern Europeans in this past? More often than not we see the national states in the region externalise violence and identify with victims of past violence without bringing up the question of responsibility for collaboration and complicity. How to describe the implicated subjects in Eastern Europe and what are the ways in which they are implicated in the past of the region?
The workshop seeks answers to these questions by exploring commemorative practices and aesthetic media of memory that enable to forge subject positions that are resisted and made difficult to imagine or to adopt by the politics of memory in different contexts in Eastern Europe.
Performing the Documentary in Eastern Europe
21 May 2021
Workshop at Lund University co-organised by the project Read more ...
9.00 Welcome (Johanna Lindbladh, Lund University and Anja Tippner, University of Hamburg
9.15 Keynote
Reflections on the Institutions and Sociology of Contemporary Russian Documentary Film (Jeremy Hicks, University of London, Queen Mary)
10.00 Break
10.10 Parallel breakout sessions: Discussions of 4-5 chapter proposals in 3 groups
12.15 Lunch
12.45 Keynote
The Documentary in Concentrationary Art (Elizabeth Saxton, University of London, Queen Mary)
13.30 Concluding Remarks
Johanna Ross presents at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences webinar “Kirjanike ilmavaatest. Seminar ilmast kirjanduses”
21 May 2021
Braving the Weather in Soviet Literature. Lilli Promet and Others.
Diana Popa presents at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (The Institute of Modern Languages Research) Seminar Series Mediated Memories of Responsibility
19 May 2021
Spectacular provocations: Spectatorship and Responsibility in Radu Jude’s Historical Films Read more ...
In her paper “Spectacular provocations: Spectatorship and Responsibility in Radu Jude’s Historical Films”, Diana explores Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015) and “Îmi este indiferent dacă intrăm în istorie ca barbari” / “I Do Not Care if We go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018), two recent films that articulate histories of violence, such as the issue of Roma slavery and the genocide of Eastern European Jewry during the Second World War, from within a specific socio-historical and cultural context. Both films are representative for the filmmaker’s continued interest in confronting Romanian audience with shameful aspects of their past. Diana will analyse how the two films use generic formats (the Western) and techniques (direct address and re-enactment) not only to entertain but also to invite spectatorial reflection on the effects on the present of a past left unaddressed by years of communist and post-communist mythmaking. She argues that analysing cinematic and narrative spectacle in relation to the spectatorial positions developed by the two films may help uncover new understandings (both notions of solidarity and also responsibility) in relation to forgotten histories and painful memories of authoritarian pasts.
Read more ...Translating Memories Speaker Series: Andrea Virginás
13 April 2021
21st Century Historical Films and Small Nations' Collective Memory: Examples from Hungary and Romania Read more ...
21st Century Historical Films and Small Nations’ Collective Memory: Examples from Hungary and Romania
Andrea Virginás (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
Tuesday, 13 April 2021 17.00 (EEST)
Tallinn University
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In the talk I will present the first results of an individual research that aims to describe, analyze and theorize the role of 21st century historical films in an Eastern European/Hungarian, Polish and Romanian context, films that have often been met with resounding success within their domestic markets. The interpretative framework derives from cultural trauma theory and memory studies combined with the analysis of fictional feature films, and Thomas Elsaesser’s argument according to which European cinema may be conceived of “as a dispositif that constitutes, through an appeal to memory and identification, a special form of address, at once highly individual and capable of fostering a sense of belonging” (Elsaesser 2005, 21). A short introduction will sketch the phenomenon within the context of the only major national cinema in the former Eastern Bloc, the Polish one, with reference to the 2007 Katyn or the 2015 Ida, suggesting that the robustness of the industry and the size of the domestic market have been important factors in succeeding to activate “3rd generation” memory work (Assmann 2012) referring chiefly to the Second World War. Then, based on the model of Aleida Assmann who connects three generations to communicative memory – the victims who lived through collective traumas, the next generation of those who forgot, and the third generation who “meant to give a voice to historical memory” (Assmann 2012, 13) – I will continue with the analysis of two small national cinemas and their pertinent examples from the 21st century, trying to understand those features that lead to the popularity of such titles as Son of Saul (L. Nemes, 2015), Aferim! (R. Jude, 2015), Bet On Revenge (G. Herendi, 2017), Morometii 2 (S. Gulea, 2018), and Eternal Winter (A Szasz, 2018). I will examine the distribution routes and awards of the films, as possibly intertwined with the high domestic audience numbers, and will pay attention to the films’ Facebook pages and the fan-based conversations developed on social media – also influenced by film critical pieces. In the stylistic and narrative analysis of the films I rely on well known concepts that connect fictional historical films and communicative memory-work: Janet Walker’s “trauma cinema,” Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory, Susannah Radstone’s “cinema/memory,” Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory (2008), or Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka’s “Erinnerungsfilm/memory film”. However, as suggested by the high audience numbers, the cryptic, innovative and creative ways of conveying collective traumatization through audiovisual storytelling have been complemented with further elements beloved by Hungarian and Romanian domestic audiences. In my conclusion I will suggest that the addition of humor, the mixing of genres and a prescience of the television aesthetics popularized by 2020s streaming platforms have been also influential in the domestic success of the mentioned films. I will end by reflecting on the issue of whether these and more recent titles – I Don’t Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (R. Jude, 2018), Tall Tales (A. Szasz, 2019), Those Who Remained (B. Toth, 2019), Queen Marie of Romania (Alexis Cahill, 2019) or Malmkrog (C. Puiu, 2020) – may be considered as creating small national collectives of remembrance around the third generation “meant to give a voice to historical memory” (Assmann 2012, 13).
Andrea Virginás – MA in Gender Studies, PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies – is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Sapientia The Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj, Romania. Her research interests include film genres, European cinema, cultural theory, intermediality, narratology. She is the author of Post/Modern Crime: From Agatha Christie to Palahniuk, from Film Noir to Memento (VDM Verlag, 2011), the editor of The Use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), and has published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, European Journal of English Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of European Studies, Communicazioni Sociali and in the volumes Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories (I. B. Tauris, 2017), New Romanian Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions, and Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Diana Popa gives a paper at the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
19 March 2021
Hopeless Didacticism: Spectatorial Mode of Address in I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
Eneken Laanes is the panelist at the online webinar Polarized Pasts at Stockholm University
13 January 2021
This webinar aims to lay the foundation for a new research program exploring the complex intersections of heritage and polarization. Eneken is part of the international advisory board of the planned program. Read more ...
This webinar aims to lay the foundation for a new research program exploring the complex intersections of heritage and polarization. Eneken is part of the international advisory board of the planned program.
Read more ...Margaret Comer gives a virtual paper in the Society for Historical Archaeology’s 2021 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology.
8 January 2021
The session, ‘Pandemic Fieldwork: Doing Fieldwork during a Pandemic’, ‘discusses both novel and reworked methodological approaches for conducting, or attempting to conduct, archeological fieldwork during a global pandemic’. Margaret‘s paper, ‘Shifting Remembrance: On-Site and Digital Memorialization of Soviet Mass Repression in the Wake of COVID-19’, focuses on how the pandemic has changed encounters with and […] Read more ...
The session, ‘Pandemic Fieldwork: Doing Fieldwork during a Pandemic’, ‘discusses both novel and reworked methodological approaches for conducting, or attempting to conduct, archeological fieldwork during a global pandemic’. Margaret‘s paper, ‘Shifting Remembrance: On-Site and Digital Memorialization of Soviet Mass Repression in the Wake of COVID-19’, focuses on how the pandemic has changed encounters with and at a network of Moscow ‘dark heritage’ sites of Soviet repression, focusing on the places of violence themselves as well as the perception and dissemination of memories these sites are meant to preserve. Digital platforms and networks have already been used to disseminate historical, memorial, and political information that risk official censure in other media; thus, this paper also examines how the pandemic has changed stakeholder, activist, and government attitudes towards digital memorialization of Soviet repression and what these changes mean for the heritagization of mass repression.
Read more ...Nordic Memory Studies Conference, Lund University with keynote by Eneken Laanes
29-30 October 2020
Conference Performing the Documentary in Post-Communist Art and Culture co-organised by Translating Memories, Lund University
16-18 October 2020
Postponed to 21-23 May 2021 Read more ...
Postponed to 21-23 May 2021
Read more ...Margaret Comer gives a paper in the first Annual Post-Socialist and Comparative Memory Studies (PoSoCoMeS, Memory Studies Association Working Group) Conference
21 September - 1 October 2020
Margaret’s presentation, entitled ‘Heritagescapes of Repression: legacies of mass violence in contemporary Russia’, examines the conceptual heritagescapes of four sites related to Soviet repression in Moscow, Russia. She is looking at how victims and perpetrators are portrayed (or not portrayed) at these sites and introducing her theoretical models of ‘grievability’ (inspired by Judith Butler’s theory […] Read more ...
Margaret’s presentation, entitled ‘Heritagescapes of Repression: legacies of mass violence in contemporary Russia’, examines the conceptual heritagescapes of four sites related to Soviet repression in Moscow, Russia. She is looking at how victims and perpetrators are portrayed (or not portrayed) at these sites and introducing her theoretical models of ‘grievability’ (inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of the same name) and ‘blameability’. Differing degrees of grievability and blameability at a given site can be plotted against each other on a chart to discern different sites’ manifestations of grief and blame, potentially allowing us to discern patterns in different types’ of sites presentations and their underlying motivations.
Read more ...Eneken Laanes presents at The Other Europe: Changes and Challenges since 1989, Yale University
11-12 September 2020
Seminar with Prof Violeta Davoliūtė Multidirectional Memory: Lithuanian Jews and the Soviet Deportations of June 1941
20 February 2020
Eneken Laanes gives a paper at Jaan Kross’s anniversary conference The Ropewalker: Jaan Kross 100
19 February 2020