Histories of Memories

Susan A. Crane
Summer 2017
TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS |  
10:00 am - 12:00 pm
August 1 - August 31, 2017
Course Format: Hybrid
Location: Main Campus
Tuition: $150

This course examines modern histories of collective memories through the institutions and technologies that facilitate recall, such as museums, photography, and visual culture. We will consider moments of tension when history and memory appear to be at odds, when competing interests in the meanings of the past have created social conflict, or when silences about the past are broken. Case studies may include: the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1995; appeals for apologies for past atrocities, such as slavery, human trafficking, or genocide; or lynching photographs in the “Without Sanctuary” exhibit of 2002. While the course emphasizes how societies come to terms with painful or shameful memories, we will also focus on the ways in which visual sources, particularly photographs, have shaped discourses of memory. By learning from scratch how to “read” historical photographs, we will interrogate the ways in which iconic images, snapshots, and “Kodak moments” have become integral to thinking about collective memory.

Meet Your Instructor

Associate Professor

SUSAN A. CRANE is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Oregon for two years before coming to the University of Arizona in 1995. Her research interests revolve around historical consciousness, subjectivity and memory. She is the author of Nothing Happened: A History (Stanford University Press, 2021) and editor of The Cultural History of Memory in the 19th Century (Bloomsbury Publishers, 2020).

Location

POETRY CENTER
Dorothy Rubel Room
1508 E Helen
Tucson, AZ 85721
United States

Located on the SE corner of Helen Street and Vine Avenue, one block north of Speedway and three blocks west of Campbell Ave.

Street map image of Poetry Center

Open Courses You May Also Be Interested In