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Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies
2007-2008
FACING DIFFICULT PASTS: HISTORY AND MEMORY
For the next two years, the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies will focus on the theme “Facing Difficult Pasts: History and Memory.” From ancient times to the present, traumatic events and dramatic shifts in power have prompted historical reflection. History itself has often become a site of memory, a means of facing or avoiding responsibility, assigning blame for past suffering and catastrophe, seeking justice or opting to let bygones be bygones. Our explorations of the theme will consider how history has been mobilized for such purposes in different times and places.
The historical study of memory, as French historian Pierre Nora has noted, usually involves two approaches. The first examines individual “sites of memory,” such as battlefields, memorials to particular events or people, and so on. Unless their original purpose has been completely forgotten, commemorations like these may serve a didactic or even cathartic function. But there are other sites as well; school texts that double as civics lessons; hymns and anthems; “treasuries” of language and literature; and much else fits into this category. The second approach looks at more diffuse or democratic creations of memory through broad cultural conversations, often persisting over time, such as those concerning national, racial or ethnic identity or national boundaries, both figurative and geographic.
To these we propose adding a third approach: historical writing—historiography—as itself a site of memory production. By teasing apart layers of historiography, scholars are studying the uses of history, for example, in Europe after the wars of religion (1618-1648); by the English and Irish during their centuries-long conflict; by the Spanish seeking to sanitize the violence of the Inquisition and the Conquistadores; in the production of the legend of Napoleon; and by Americans confronting the rifts of race and region in the wake of the Civil War.
Reflection on the uses of history is also central to colonial and post-colonial studies, as this field considers both colonizers' acts of violence and subjugation and the nature and degree of opposition among the colonized. This painful re-examination reaches into the core of many former empires and contemporary nations: consider British and Indian or Dutch and Indonesian responses to their conjoined histories, or the efforts of indigenous peoples within the Americas and the Antipodes to reconstruct accounts of their own pasts. Similar patterns may be seen in the field of slavery/slave trade studies, where scholars are seeking to understand how problems of race, class, ethnicity, and religion became manifest in societies with a legacy of slavery. While this has been a familiar theme in European and American histories for some time, it is less so for areas where the legacy has been less visible. Now, however, investigations into the uses of history are beginning with regard to the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slave trades in various parts of the Muslim world.
For the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism, the Holocaust and the Gulag, have been the starting point of much historical self-reflection. Significant literatures exist on history and memory in France after Vichy; Italy and its fascist past; Poles and Jews on the Holocaust; Russia after the Soviet Union; Czechoslovakia in the Stalinist era, and so on. The century's wars have also generated a good deal of historical reflection, including work on both France and Germany after World War I, the Balkans after World War II, and Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. Scholarship is also emerging about Turkey and the question of Armenian genocide; South Africa and apartheid; China and the Cultural Revolution; Japan after Imperial Japan; and Argentina, Chile, and Brazil after dictatorships.
The series will address these and other issues at both the historical and historiographical level, asking not only how specific nations and societies have faced difficult pasts in earlier times, but also what problems these pasts pose for historians working today. How should historians write about difficult pasts? What are the ethical as well as intellectual issues they must address? To answer these questions, we will turn not only to historians but also to scholars in other disciplines, including those investigating how societies build peace after civil conflict and carry out projects of “transitional justice.” We will also call upon scholars who are examining material and public sites of memory, such as museums, monuments, re-enactments, and film.
To develop this theme, the Center for Historical Studies will organize several different types of events. For the 2007-8 academic year, we have invited four scholars to present their research in a series of seminars focusing on “Method and Memory.” In 2008-9, we will organize a workshop or small conference around the theme of “Memory, Justice and Reconciliation.”
Spring 2008 Theme Seminar Program: Method and Memory
Seminar discussions are based on pre-circulated papers, which participants are asked to read in advance. Copies of the papers will be available in the History Department office ten days before each seminar or may be requested by e-mail from historycenter@umd.edu . Thirty minutes prior to each seminar refreshments will be available in 2118 Taliaferro Hall. Seminars are held in 2110 Taliaferro Hall. For more information, contact the same e-mail address or phone (301) 405-8739.
Monday, April 7 
“Facing Revolutionary Violence”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Jean-Clément Martin , University of Paris I - Sorbonne-Panthéon ............. . .. Commentator: Donald Sutherland, University of Maryland
Monday, April 21 
"Ideology and Cold War Memory:Towards an International History of Anti-Communism"
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia
Commentator:
Robert Friedel, University of Maryland
Faculty Work-in-Progress Seminar
Monday, February 18 
“Murders in Provence”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Donald M. G. Sutherland, Department of History, University of Maryland Commentator: David Bell, John Hopkins University
Endowed Lectures
Nathan and Jeanette Miller Distinguished Lectureship in History and Public Affairs ... . . Monday, March 10
“Making Film, Making History, Making a Difference: Documentary and the African American Experience”
Charles Burnett, Independent Filmmaker
Nyumburu Cultural Center, Multipurpose Room, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Reception to follow lecture
Teaching the Films of Charles Burnett: Tuesday,
April 8, 11:30 – 1:00
2120 FSK, Lunch Provided
Rundell Lecture in American History
Monday, May 5
"The Spectre of the Wageless Life"
Michael Denning, Yale University
Nyumburu Cultural Center, Multipurpose Room, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Reception to follow lecture
Co-Sponsored Seminars, Workshops, and Conferences
African American Political Culture Workshops
History Graduate Student Conference ....................................................... . .. Keynote Address Thursday, February 7 ....................................................... . .. “The Windmill Theatre: Middlebrow, Erotic Display and the Spirit of the Blitz” .......... ... Judith Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University ................................................. . Taliaferro Hall, Room 1103, 4:00-6:00 p.m. . ............... .. . .......................... . Graduate Student Papers: Friday, February 8, Taliaferro Hall , 8:00 a.m.- 5:30 p.m.
Maryland Colloquium in the History of Technology
Washington Area Early American Seminar Series
Brownbag Series: Conversations in the Humanities
Monday, February 25, Brown Bag Lunch Seminar with William Cohen, Assistant Professor of Russian, University of Maryland, FSK 2120 (Merrill Room), at 1 p.m.
Wednesday, April 16 , Brown Bag Lunch Seminar with William Peniston, Manager of the Newark Museum Library & Archives, University of Maryland, FSK 2120 (Merrill Room), at noon
Monday, April 28 , Brown Bag Lunch Seminar with Elizabeth Papazian, Assistant Professor of Russian, University of Maryland, FSK 2120 (Merrill Room), at noon
Fall 2007 Theme Seminar Program: Method and Memory
Seminar discussions are based on pre-circulated papers, which participants are asked to read in advance. Copies of the papers will be available in the History Department office ten days before each seminar or may be requested by e-mail from historycenter@umd.edu . Thirty minutes prior to each seminar refreshments will be available in 2118 Taliaferro Hall. Seminars are held in 2110 Taliaferro Hall. For more information, contact the same e-mail address or phone (301) 405-8739.
Monday, September 17 
“The Italian '68: A Site of Memory, A Site of Oblivion”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Luisa Passerini , University of Turin
Monday, December 10 
“Anniversaries as Vehicles for Remembering (and Forgetting) the Past: The Observance of National Humiliation Day in Republican China”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Paul Cohen , Harvard University and Wellesley College
Commentator: James Gao, Department of History, University of Maryland
Transnational Seminar
Co-sponsored by the European and Latin American Caucuses and The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies
Tuesday, September 18
“An Italian-German Jewish Couple in the 1930s and 1940s, in Europe and Latin America : A Microhistory in a Wider Context”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Luisa Passerini , University of Turin
Commentator: Mary Kay Vaughan, Department of History, University of Maryland
4th Annual Distinguished Alumni Lecture
Wednesday, September 26 
“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”
Nyumburu Cultural Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:30 p.m.
Manning Marable, Columbia University
Neorealismo Conference
Co-sponsored by the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies, the Department of History, the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Office of International Programs, DRIF and the College of Arts and Humanities
Thursday, October 4 - Friday, October 5
NEOREALISMO: EXAMINING THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF A TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL MOVEMENT
St. Mary's Hall, Multipurpose Room
Faculty Work-in-Progress Seminar
Friday, October 26 
“Mexican Men at the Movies”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Mary Kay Vaughan, Department of History, University of Maryland
Commentator: Saverio Giovacchini, Department of History, University of Maryland
Thirty-sixth Annual Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies Conference:
Co-sponsored by the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies
October 26-28, 2007
Asia Rising: Departures, Destinations, Dreams
University of Maryland, College Park
Event Program
Faculty Work-in-Progress Seminar
Friday, November 16
“Mrs. Wilkins Dances: Racial Etiquette and Enactment at the St. Louis World's Fair”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 12:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
James Gilbert, Department of History, University of Maryland
Commentator: Jonathan Auerbach, Department of English, University of Maryland
Seminar
Thursday, November 29
“The Discomfort of Images: Photographing Italian Concentration Camps Today ” Photograph From Event
Francis Scott Key Hall, Merrill Room, 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Antonello Mazzei, Independent Photographer
A light supper will be available
Seminar
******** PLEASE NOTE THE DATE, TIME, AND PLACE OF THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED*********  Wednesday, December 5
“David Ben-Gurion - 1935-1965: Thirty Years of Strategic Decisions”
Taliaferro Hall, Room 2110, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Tuvia Friling, Ben-Gurion Research Institute
Lunch will be available
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