Colloquium Participant Profiles
RACHEL ADAMS: Associate
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia
University. Professor Adams specializes in 19th- and
20th-century literatures of the United States and the
Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and
sexuality, and disability studies. She is currently
writing a book on cultures of the North American continent,
which includes materials from the U.S., Canada, and
Mexico. Her first book, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and
the American Cultural Imagination, was published by
the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2001. She is
also co-editor (with David Savran) of The Masculinity
Studies Reader, which was published by Blackwell Press
in 2001. She is editor of a critical edition of Kate
Chopin's The Awakening (Fine Publications, 2002). Recent
articles have appeared in journals such as American
Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly,
Minnesota Review, Camera Obscura, GLQ, and Signs.
EFRAT BLOOM: My current
work deals with testimony literature, representations
of trauma (the Holocaust, in particular), psychoanalytic
models of memory, writing and recollection, the notion
of the archive, memory in modern and postmodern literature,
literature of exile and the Diaspora.
BELLA BRODZKI: I am interested
in almost every aspect of memory studies. I am currently
teaching an advanced undergradate literature seminar
entitled "Of Memory, Memorialization, and Writing."
Some of the readings in this course which addresses
the relationship between individual and collective memory
include: Borges' "Funes the Memorious," Swann's
Way, essays by Bergson, Freud, Benjamin's Berlin Chronicles,
Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood, Nabokov's Speak,
Memory, Morrison's Beloved, Love in the Time of Cholera,
Imagining Argentina, Pierre Nora's Les lieux de memoire.
The spring half of the course will look more closely
at Death, Mourning and Memory, from individual and collective
perspectives.
RITA CHARON is Professor
of Clinical Medicine at the College of Physicians and
Surgeons of Columbia University and Director of the
Program in Narrative Medicine. She has published and
lectured extensively on linguistic studies of doctor-patient
conversations, narrative competence in physicians and
medical students, narrative ethics, and empathy in medical
practice. Dr. Charon's research has focused on doctor-patient
communication, methods of teaching medical interviewing,
and the outcomes of narrative training in medicine.
Currently editor-in-chief of the journal Literature
and Medicine, Dr. Charon is the co-editor of Stories
Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Routledge,
2002) and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (SUNY,
in press). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Narrative,
Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American
Medical Association, Literature and Medicine, Lancet,
and The New England Journal of Medicine. Her Narrative
Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness will be published
by Oxford University Press in 2006.
MARY MARSHALL CLARK is the
Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research
Office. The Office, founded by Pulitzer Prize winning
historian Allan Nevins in 1948, is the first university-based
organized oral history program and archive in the world.
The Oral History Research Office is a leading program
for teaching oral history method and theory in the United
States and an international center for research and scholarship
in the field of oral history. Clark teaches a graduate
course on the history, methodology and applications of
oral history at Columbia, and directs the annual Columbia
University Summer Institute on Oral History, an international
seminar. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization
of American Historians. Clark is past president of the
United States Oral History Association, and has served
on the Executive Council of the International Oral History
Association. With Peter Bearman, the sociologist, she
founded “The September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative
and Memory Project,” a longitudinal oral history
project through which over 1,000 hours of interviews were
taken with eye-witnesses and immigrants and others who
suffered in the aftermath of the events. A descriptive
essay by Clark on the September 11, 2001 oral history
project is published in History and September 11th, published
by Temple University Press. Prior to her career at Columbia
University, Clark was an oral historian at the New York
Times and worked in documentary film. Clark holds two
masters degrees from Union Theological Seminary.
SARAH COLE is Assistant
Professor of English and Comparative Literature and
Columbia University and specializes in British literature
of the 19thand 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the
modernist period. Areas of interest include war; violence,
sexuality and the body; history and memory; and post-colonial
studies. Her book, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the
First World War, was published by Cambridge University
Press in 2003. She has published articles in ELH and
Modern Fiction Studies, and has an essay in the volume
Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial
Literature (University of Minnesota Press 2003). She
is currently working on a project that investigates
the interrelations between violence and art in the modernist
period.
PATRICIA DAILEY is Assistant
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia
University. She specializes in medieval literature and
culture (English, Dutch, French, and Italian) and critical
theory, focusing on women's writing, dream visions,
Anglo-Saxon poetry, and medieval rhetoric. Patricia
Dailey has written on Hadewijch, Julian of Norwich,
Marguerite Porete, Hildegard von Bingen, Old English
riddles, as well as on Beowulf. She is currently working
on her manuscript Promised Bodies which focuses on temporality,
embodiment, and inscription in medieval women's visionary
texts and Anglo-Saxon poetry. In addition to her work
in medieval literature, she has translated works by
Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains, Stanford 2005),
Jean-François Lyotard, and Antonio Negri. She
is the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium
(www.columbia.edu/cu/assc).
TAMAR EFRAT is currently
working on her dissertation entitled Loss and the Creation
of Personal and Cultural Memory in Film: A Second-Generation
Video Artist's Autoethnography. i.e. an analysis of
films and videos by Elida Schogt, Abraham Ravett and
Rea Tajiri. Questions such as the following are being
addressed: Given that the reconstruction of cultural
memory is possible via film and video genre, how does
cultural memory get constructed using autobiographical
and autoethnographic film and video?
MARIANNE HIRSCH is Professor
of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
where she also has an appointment in the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender. Her recent publications
include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory
(1997), The Familial Gaze (ed.1999), Time and the Literary
(co-ed.2002), a special issue of Signs on "Gender
and Cultural Memory" (co-ed. 2002), and Teaching
the Representation of the Holocaust (co-ed. 2004). Over
the last few years, she has also published numerous
articles on cultural memory, visuality and gender, particularly
on the representation of World War Two and the Holocaust
in literature, testimony and photography. Currently,
she is writing a book with Leo Spitzer entitled Ghosts
of Home : Czernowitz and the Holocaust. She is the editor
of PMLA and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the ACLS, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute,
the National Humanities Center, and the Bellagio and
Bogliasco Foundations.
JENNIFER JAMES is a second-year
PhD candidate of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University. She received her M.A. degree
in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College in 2004.
Her Masters thesis entitled "Tracing the Shadows
of Present Foremothers: The Textual Performance of Embodied
Memory in Ana Historic and La Maison Trestler"
focused on the textual inscription of an embodied women's
counter-memory in the novels of two Canadian women writers,
Daphne Marlatt and Michelle Ouellette-Michaslka. She
is currently interested in the gendered body as a mediating
factor in the construction of collective memories across
nations; literary and artistic figurations of American
national memory; the role material culture plays in
collective responses to trauma (particularly nineteenth
century American decorative and folk art and its relationship
to the civil and Native American wars); and the various
intersections that can be made between psychoanalysis,
genetics, bioethics, and disability studies in understanding
how the body remembers.
SUSANNE C. KNITTEL is
a second-year PhD candidate of Italian and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University. She received an MA
degree in Comparative Literature and Art History at
Konstanz University in her native Germany. Her main
research interests center around questions of memory
and its relation to architecture and space in modern
and contemporary literature, but she is also interested
in text-image relationships and urban studies. Her MA
thesis "Spaces of Memory in Giorgio Bassani, Ruth
Klüger and W.G.
Sebald," written under the direction of Aleida
Assman in Konstanz, is published in the Konstanz University
online catalogue. As the recipient of the "Elite
Stipendium des Landes Baden Württemberg" she
spent two years at Yale University where she worked
with Shoshana Felman and Paolo Valesio. During this
time she also interned at the International Center for
Transitional Justice in NYC where she developed the
presentation "The Power of Memorials: Human Rights,
Justice, and the Struggle for Memory," which examines
the importance of memorials in the process of democratization.
NENI PANOURGIA: Assistant
Professor, Anthropology at Columbia University. The
foundations of my project rest on the questions of reflexivity,
objectivity, and intersubjectivity in the context of
anthropological productions of knowledge, with specific
focus on the nexus of death, illness, and memory in
the process of identity formation. The locus of this
research is the urban space, especially the way it has
been framed and conceptualized in Greece. Currently
I am working on a project on the character of "Oedipus"
as a paradigmatic figure for the anthropological endeavor
attempting to articulate a discourse on the political
commensurable to the Oedipean specificity: the fragmented
body, bio-politics, technologies of self and technologies
of othering, autonomy through self-alteration. One of
the points of this inquiry is the notion of "bare
life" in the concentration camps for communists
in the Greek Civil War and the US "war on terror";
torture and civil disobedience; Oedipus as the prototype
of Foucauldean bio-politics; urban guerrilla groups;
Oedipus as the tragic struggle of the post-Enlightenment
modernist subject under the weight of discourses on
self-knowledge; and the possibility of the autonomy
of the subject through the process of self-alteration.
JOANNA SCUTTS is a fourth-year
PhD candidate in the department of English and Comp
Lit at Columbia. She received her BA in English from
the University of Cambridge and her MA in 20th Century
Literature from Sussex University, where she developed
her current interest in the cultural memory of the First
World War. She is beginning her dissertation on the
relationship between official forms of commemoration
and combatant memoirs in the 1920s, and she is particularly
interested in war memory as a flexible narrative with
the capacity to respond to changing historical and political
events.
BRIGITTE SION is a Ph.D.
candidate in Performance Studies at New York University.
Her dissertation focuses on the performance of memory
through memorials and monuments. She is conducting research
at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and at the memorials
to the Desaparecidos (victims of state repression) in
Buenos Aires. She looks at the tension between absent
victims' bodies and visitors, and at the competition
of functions newly assigned to memorials, from starchitecture
to political legacy, from surrogate graveyard to tourism
destination. She has previously published a book on
theatrical performances during the Holocaust.
LEO SPITZER is the Kathe
Tappe Vernon Professor of History at Dartmouth College
and Visiting Professor of History at Columbia University.
His recent publications include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture
of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang,
1998), Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality
in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (Cambridge/ Hill
& Wang, 1990, 1999) and the co-edited Acts of Memory:
Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE, 1999). He has
also written numerous articles on Holocaust and Jewish
refugee memory. Currently, he is working on a new book,
Ghosts of Home, with Marianne Hirsch.
KATE STANLEY is a second-year
PhD student of English at Columbia University. Her M.A.
work on juridical, reconciliatory, narratorial, and
memorializing responses to twentieth-century traumatic
events was informed by a continuing investment in psychoanalysis
and trauma theory. She is currently interested in what
might be called the "texture" of memory-the
place of touch and the status of material objects, particularly
as they are implicated in processes of mourning, perception
and identification-in relation to modernist literature,
theories of affect and object relations theory.
MARITA STURKEN: Associate
Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU. My work
spans the fields of cultural studies, popular culture,
consumer culture, and art and technology. It is interdisciplinary
with an emphasis on the ways in which individuals create
meaning from cultural products and artifacts, focusing
on cultural memory and national identity, images and
visual culture, the social function of art, and the
cultural effects of technology. I have recently finished
a book called Tourists of History: Memory, Mourning,
and Kitsch in American Culture. This book examines aspects
of cultural memory, consumerism, and paranoia in American
culture in relation to the response in the US to the
Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 and the terrorists
attacks of 9/11. This book argues that It is concerned
primarily with how the cultural memory of those events
is manifested in a rush to memorialization and in forms
of kitsch, consumerism, and compulsive reenactment.
SONALI THAKKAR is a first-year
PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative
Literature. She is interested in how societies emerging
from a period of political atrocity and oppression deal
with the past not only through legal mechanisms such
as truth commissions and war crimes tribunals, but also
through cultural mechanisms such as museums and memorials,
which should be understood as part of the process of
transitional justice. She is particularly concerned
with the experiences of Germany after WWII and South
Africa after the end of apartheid. She is increasingly
interested in the spatial dimensions of memory, and
is currently thinking about the status of bodily remains
in human rights discourse.
LAURA THOMAS: I am a
doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature
studying performance editions of Shakespeare. I am attempting
to situate the problems of cultural memory as it relates
to landmark theatrical performances that shape a generation
of theatergoers and mediates their experiences of the
canonical Shakepeare (ie, Irving, Booth in the nineteenth
century chapter) - how do these performance editions
serve as memorials to the productions themselves? How
do they relate to the collective experience of attending
the theater and to the development of a culture's concept
of theater? The project requires some theoretical grounding
and I would welcome suggestions for works on theater
and cultural memory. I also am working on a memoir and/or
a study of memoir and literary uses of eyewitness accounts
of 9/11, (including accounts of the dead available in
transcripts) addressing how "official" sites
of cultural memory employ (or don't) what is found in
these narratives. For this project I see the work of
James E. Young on Holocaust issues as relevant; perhaps
our group could examine his Texture of Memory or At
Memory's Edge.
SLOANE WHIDDEN: I am
currently working in the Collections Management department
at the Museum of the City of New York as the Assistant
Registrar. I completed an M.A. in Museum Anthropology
from Columbia University in 2004. My graduate work focused
on the significance of the relationship between shared
memory and the formation of collective identities in
the museum context. My thesis explored these themes
by looking closely at the way that U.S. immigration
history is depicted in museums and the reactions of
museum audiences to those depictions. I received a B.A.
in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2002.
My undergraduate thesis examined the impact of the legalization
of divorce on women in Ireland.
LOUISE YELIN: Professor,
Purchase College I am currently working on memory as
it plays out in the work of contemporary British migrant
writers--British born elsewhere, live elsewhere, or
write elsewhere or (as in the case of Sebald, "otherwise").
|
