January 30
One pill makes you remember and the other changes your gender? Is science the new future of autobiographical memory? Author, journalist and zine artist Pagan Kennedy will talk about how drugs developed in the 20th century forever changed the rules of remembering our lives and living in a human body.
Her talk will spring out of her two latest books. Her novel, Confessions of a Memory Eater (2006), revolves around a drug that restores autobiographical memory; the main character becomes "addicted" to his own memory. Her biography, The First Man-Made Man (2007), tells the story of the first person in the world to undergo a female-to-male sex change in 1950s Britain. Together these works tackle questions of autobiographical memory, from our own desires to relive the past through to ways we seek to obscure or rewrite autobiographical memory to bring it into line with a sex change.
Pagan Kennedy is the author of nine books and a contributor to dozens of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, Dwell, and Details. She has won an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Smithsonian fellowship, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, a place on the New York Times Notable Book list, and a Massachusetts Book Award Honor in Nonfiction. She is currently a columnist for The Boston Globe Ideas section
April 25 at 4:30 p.m. (special time)
There will be no roundtable discussion the following morning.
Is DNA the new personal memory bank? Is genomic ancestry testing memory's future -- a new kind of personhood? Associate Research Professor of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University Charmaine Royal directs her talk to advances in human genetics and genomics as increasingly revolutionizing science, medicine, and society.
Royal is concerned with genomic ancestry's potential role in social justice, and the challenging issues that arise when social identity is traced by genomics. What happens to personal memory (memories of you and family genealogy) when genomic codes reveal ancestral lineage either coincident with or contrary to family lore? What happens to social histories of race and social identity?
In an attempt to highlight some of the emerging issues relevant to social identity and social justice, and to help provide frameworks for assessing them, Charmaine Royal's presentation will focus on the application of genetics and genomics in genomic ancestry testing and in health disparities research.
Author and co-author of numerous publications, Charmaine Royal has published most recently Race and Ethnicity in Science, Medicine, and Society, The Ethical and Social Implications of Exploring African American Genealogies, Genetic and Social Environment Interactions and Their Impact on Health Policy, and The Role of Genetic and Sociopolitical Definitions of Race in Clinical Trials.
March 11
Do photographs act as testimonial objects between today and yesterday, this generation and previous ones, memory and postmemory, personal and cultural recollection, gender and generation?
Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender of Columbia University, Marianne Hirsch will look at postmemory and the place of photographs as a medium of transmission of memories from one generation to the next. Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.
Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of trans-generational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, she examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance.
Author of the forthcoming book, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of a Czernowitz in Jewish Memory and History (with Leo Spitzer) and her book-in-progress The Generation of Postmemory: Gender, Visuality and the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch also edited Gender and Cultural Memory, Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Fall 2002) and earlier the well known book Conflicts in Feminism (with Evelyn Fox Keller). This lecture is co-sponsored by Genocide Series.
March 25
If scientists decode memory in living cells, how do architects code memory in space and time? Is putting one foot in front of the other akin to moving about history's memory?
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, Elissa Rosenberg will explore the geography of memory, that is, the spatiality of history and the ways in which memory is evoked and mediated through our relationship to physical place. She looks at the ways in which walking inscribes the body in place, and how our relationship to place, in turn, instigates a particular kind of remembering. She will discuss two memorials in which the encounter with place unfolds over time through the act of walking, through extremely different styles of walking and through different modes of engagement with their sites.
These are: Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan at Benjamin's burial site in Portbou, Spain, and Memorial to the Departed Jewish Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel, Bayerische Platz, Berlin an installation by German artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock commemorating the disappearance and murder of some 6000 Jewish neighborhood residents.
Elissa Rosenberg is the author of "Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg-Nord" in The Hand and the Soul: Ethics and Aesthetics in Architecture and Art, "The Geography of Memory: Walking as Remembrance," and "Suburban Sublime: Herman Miller Cherokee" in Between Form and Circumstance: Re-Thinking the Contemporary Landscape: The Recent Practice of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. This lecture is co-sponsored by Environmental Studies and Architectural Studies.
April 9
Are new technologies - cell phones, ipods, nanotechnology - new genres of memory and life? Are stem cells, 'immortal' cell lines and genomics a new literary genre of life, gender and personhood? Fisher Center pre-doctoral fellow Cynthia Current will examine how new combinations of life, technology and culture gestate in science and literature. She is interested in how science, technology and literature do more than mediate or represent forms of life.
Memory, race and gender are created anew, she argues, in what today are being called 'biocultures' - minglings of science, technology, and literature. Cynthia Current is completing a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a certificate in Women's Studies from Duke University.
Her dissertation, "Fingerprinting to Genomics: Technologies of Race and Gender in American Literature," explores the implications of technology on identity formation in American literature from 1880 to 1910. A concluding chapter draws such concerns into recent debates on human genomics. She has a forthcoming essay, "Innovation and Stasis: Technology and Race in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson," and served as a co-editor of The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: an Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Writing.
Presentations will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Geneva Room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library, on Pulteney Street, on the HWS campus unless otherwise noted.
All morning roundtables will be held from 9 to 10 a.m. in Room 212 Demarest Hall, the Fisher Center.