Confirmed Speakers:
Prof. Marianne Hirsch
Marianne Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her work draws on literary, artistic and theoretical sources, as well as on her own family memories as the daughter of Holocaust survivors who spent her childhood in communist Romania. Her books include The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989); Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997); The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012). Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2019) were both co-authored with Leo Spitzer. She recently co-edited Women Mobilizing Memory and Imagining Everyday Life: Encounters with Vernacular Photography (2020). Hirsch is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University, a former president of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently working on a book about the reparative potentials of memory. See her Website: https://www.mariannehirsch.org/
Prof. Leo Spitzer
Leo Spitzer is the K. T. Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. A 2014 Research Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa, and current Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, he is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller/Bellagio, Ford, and Bogliasco Foundations. His most recent book, co-authored with Marianne Hirsch, is Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (California). He is also the author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (Hill & Wang); Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation (Hill & Wang); The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (Wisconsin); and co-editor, with Mieke Bal and Jonathan Crewe, of Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (UPNE). Currently, with Marianne Hirsch, he is writing a book, School Photos in Liquid Time: Archives of Possibility, and working on a series of vignettes, some autobiographical, for a book about the Americanization of Jewish refugee children emigrating from Latin America to the United States in the decade of the 1950s. See his website: https://leospitzer.net/