Other Clusters

Cluster 1: Performance: Object / Body / Place

Cluster 2: Visuality: Image / Media / Signs

Cluster 3: Memory: Museums / Preservation / Archives

Cluster 3


Memory: Museums / Preservation / Archives

In this cluster students explore the forms and practices of social memory across a great spectrum of institutions and cultural phenomena including museums, memorials and monuments, souvenirs and private collections, cultural and ethnic festivals, ethnographic documentation, textual repositories and diverse forms of art. 

What lies behind the organization of a museum exhibition, the construction of an official monument or the sudden infusion of folklore into a musical score? How do dominant and historically excluded or underrepresented communities engage in “memory work” and negotiate or struggle over public presentations of the past?

Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the modern museum system and the challenges of representing and commemorating historical trauma. We consider, as well, changing definitions and practices of the “archives”; who determines — and who should determine — the contents of archives and the nature of public access to them?  

Elective Courses

  • History, Time and Tradition (ANTH 108b) *
  • Museums and Public Memory (ANTH 159a) *
  • Coexistence, Cultural Work, and the Arts (COEX 250a)
  • South African Literature and Apartheid (ENG 147b)
  • Testimony, Law and Literature (ENG 197b)
  • Psychoanalytic Theory (ENG 211a)
  • In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Global Encounters (GECS 160a)
  • Thought and Culture in Modern America (HIST 169a)
  • Italian Films, Italian Histories (HIST 170a)
  • Narrative Strategies: Writing History in a Post-Modern Age (HIST 188a) *
  • Historical Research: Methods and New Departures (HIST 210a)
  • Art, Artifacts, and History: The Material Culture of Modern Jews (NEJS 133a)
  • Film and the Holocaust (NEJS 181b) *
  • History and Memory in the Middle East (NEJS 291a)
  • Describing Cruelty (NEJS 190a)

(* denotes core course)

Cultural Production Faculty with Interests in Social Memory

  • Mark Auslander (Anthropology)
  • Paul Jankowski (History)
  • Richard Parmentier (Anthropology)
  • Ellen Schattschneider (Anthropology)
  • Nancy Scott (Fine Arts)
  • Harleen Singh (GREA & Women's and Gender Studies)
  • Faith Smith (English and American Literature; African and Afro-American Studies)

Questions and Conversations

Selected Online Resources