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Margaret Comer presents her work at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre

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.

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