We are delighted to officially announce that a reading circle with Prof. Alison Landsberg has been organized for July 21^st 2023 (14:00 - 16:30).

Professor Landsberg is a scholar in the field of memory studies.  Her book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia UP, 2004) considers the way in which individuals are increasingly able to take on memories of events they did not live through.  She is interested in the potential of such memories to produce empathy and to become the grounds for progressive politics. Professor Landsberg has been invited to speak at conferences in the Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and France.  In 2007, the journal Rethinking History published a forum on her book.

Her book entitled, Engaging the Past, explores popular modes of engagement with the past in contemporary mediated society, and the ramifications of those modes of engagement for the projects of history and politics. Considering a wide range of history texts—historical fiction films, TV historical dramas, Reality History TV, Immersive History Museum websites, among others—this book engages with the dynamics of the experiential to explain both what it makes possible for people and what it obscures or refuses.  Engaging the Past suggests that these popular engagements pose some fundamental challenges for our sense of what constitutes history in the 21^st century, but also that academic historians need to take more seriously the kind of work popular media can do in the production of historical knowledge.

Her text “Counter-Temporalities and Dialectical Images in the Mass Cultural Rewriting of US Racial Histories“ for our reading circle is an unpublished chapter in the forthcoming book Routledge History and the Moving Image. With the clearly strong thematic connection to a number of faculties, and a striking relevance for all TUDiSC projects, we are excited to talk to her about her most recent work and hope you will join us for a thought-provoking reading circle.

Please note this is an internal event. All TUDiSC members and invited guests should have received the text and Zoom link via E-Mail. If this is not the case please feel free to get in touch