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Dedicated Semester 2019: Memory

HomeAcademic NewsDedicated Semester 2019: Memory

The human experience is deeply rooted in memory. It is the raw material of personal identity and community. It informs our narratives, generates our myths, justifies our politics, and sustains our cultures. Memory gives us our autobiographical individual selves, yet memory also binds us to one another. In spite of this, memory is always contentious and selective, even traumatic, and its meanings are subjective. Thus, paradoxically, memory also divides our ideologies, our faiths, our daily experiences. In his famous 1918 essay on seeking a “usable past,” Van Wyck Brooks argued, “The spiritual past has no objective reality; it yields only what we are able to look for in it.” The Dedicated Semester will examine these concerns, with special emphasis on the technologies of memory, the effect of memory on personhood throughout the life cycle, and the ways in which memory, culture, and identity are linked.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Ongoing

Fontbonne: Now and Then
An exhibit in partnership with the library, advancement, and department of humanities, to include development of an online archive to be stored in the new institutional repository

August
28: Film screening: Alive Inside (documentary on music, memory, and Alzheimer’s), 11:00 AM, Lewis Room

September
4: Convocation speaker: Andrew Butler, Washington University Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, on the malleability of memory, 10:15 AM, DSAC Gym

10: Creative Writing Club meeting with memory writing prompts, 6:00 PM, East 105

11: September 11 memory wall

18: Ben Moore, speaking on John Gergen and remembering Soulard, 11:00 AM, AB 203

20: Bellefontaine Cemetery Tour, 1:30-3:30

25: Film screening: The Language You Cry In (documentary about the Gullah culture of the southeast and its connections to West Africa that have endured the Middle Passage, slavery, and segregation), 11:00 AM, Lewis Room

October
3: Class visit from Nick Sacco, ranger at the Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site, 3:30 PM, East 103

7: Zahid Anwar and Jason Finley, talk on computer memory vs. human memory, 2:00 PM, Lewis Room

8: Field trip and tour to Whitehaven (Ulysses S Grant home) with Nick Sacco

14: Jason Finley, Janus seminar on mnemonic devices, 11:00 AM, Library 05

23: Film screening: Rashoman, 11:00 AM, AB 202

28: Halloween memory wall

November
6: Film screening: Memory Hackers (documentary on biology and memory), 11:00 AM, Lewis Room

11: Family memory wall

11-15: Visiting artist, Deborah Aschheim student workshops, exhibit, and lecture (details TBA)

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