Seminars

Cultural Memory

Year Founded 2007

Seminar # 717

StatusActive

The University Seminar on Cultural Memory began in 2005 as an interdisciplinary colloquium welcoming graduate students and faculty from Columbia and its neighbors. The Seminar, incepted in 2007, builds upon this already-established community and aims to further develop a vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue on contemporary issues of cultural and collective memory, including but not limited to traumatic memory, collective and national forgetting, memorialization and museology, historical consciousness and historiography, embodied memory and performance, archive and testimony. The Seminar meets monthly and, in addition to discussing chapters and works-in-progress, hosts a series of distinguished visiting speakers, working in close cooperation with relevant departments and institutes at Columbia.

Chair/s

Marianne Hirsch

mh2349@columbia.edu

Andreas Huyssen

ah26@columbia.edu

Sonali Thakkar

st4617@nyu.edu

Rapporteur/s

Isabel Blankfield

imb2142@columbia.edu

External Website

Conference Registration

Meeting Schedule

There are no upcoming meetings for this seminar scheduled at this time.

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Past Meetings

Scheduled

18
Nov

November 18, 20256:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Deutsches Haus

Columbia University

Reparations and the Human (2025)

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Speaker/s

David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania

Respondent/s

Jack Halberstam, Columbia University

Sonali Thakkar, New York University

Abstract

Eng’s new book investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human.

Scheduled

14
Oct

October 14, 20256:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Faculty House

German Holocaust Memory Culture from Model to McCarthyism

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Speaker/s

Jonathon Catlin, University of Rochester

Respondent/s

Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

Abstract

The events of October 7 and their aftermath have revealed major shifts in the often celebrated German memory culture regarding the Holocaust. This lecture will address these shifts in the context of recent debates surrounding memory of the Holocaust and colonialism in Germany. In light of blind spots in German responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the talk casts doubt on the efficacy of German “negative exceptionalism” regarding memory of the Nazi past.

Scheduled

15
Sep

September 15, 20256:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Faculty House

A Roundtable Discussion With Members of the Newly Formed: Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network

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Speaker/s

Atina Grossmann, Cooper Union

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University

Dirk Moses, CUNY City College of New York

Raz Segal, Stockton University

Alisa Solomon, Columbia University

Moderator: Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University

Abstract

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