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Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies
2008-2009
FACING DIFFICULT PASTS: MEMORY, JUSTICE, AND RECONCILIATION
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.”
FALL 2008 Theme Seminar Program
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.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
12:30-2:00PM
1140 Plant Science Building
"Flat Feet and Draft Dodging: The Making of Disability in World War I America"
Beth Linker, Professor of History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, October 16, 2008
7:30-9:00PM
0106 Francis Scott Key Hall
Distinguished Alumni/ae Lecture
"The Exotic, the Neurotic, and the Ordinary: Call Girls in the Post-World War II United States"
Cindy Aron, Professor of History
University of Virginia
Monday, November 10, 2008
4:00-6:00PM
2110 Taliaferro Hall
Book Launch
Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War
John Tetsuro Sumida, Professor of History
University of Maryland
Monday, December 1, 2008
4:00-6:00PM
2110 Taliaferro Hall
Faculty Work-in-Progress
David A. Grimstead, Professor of History
University of Maryland
Thursday, December 4, 2008
5:30-7:00PM
0106 Francis Scott Key Hall
"Recruiting and Retaining an All-Volunteer Army"
Beth Bailey, Professor of History at Temple University
Jennifer Mittelstadt, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Penn State University
SPRING 2009 Theme Seminar Program
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.
Theme Seminars
Rundell Lecture
Monday, May 11, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
McKeldin Special Events Room (6137)
Reception to follow
"A Delicate Balance in Postwar Liberalism: Public and Private Power in the Renewal of American Cities"
Lizbeth Cohen, Chair, History Department, and Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University
Friday, April 24, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
2110 Taliaferro Hall
Reception to follow
Book Launch
The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal
Julie Greene, Professor of History at the University of Maryland
Comment by Sonya Michel, Professor of History at the University of Maryland
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
12:15-1:30PM
2110 Taliaferro Hall
Brown Bag Lunch
"Re-Envisioning History Through the Lens of Black Barbers"
Douglas Bristol, Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi
Miller Lecture
Thursday, March 12, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
6137 McKeldin Library
Reception to follow
"Writing an Integrated History of the Holocaust: New Vistas and Major Challenges"
Saul Friedlander, Professor of History at the University of California Los Angeles
Monday, February 23, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
2110 Taliaferro Hall
"Activating the Past: Historical Memory and Ritual Retrieval in the Black Atlantic World"
Andrew Apter, Professor of History at the University of California Los Angeles
Comment by Hilary Jones, History Department
Scholar-in-Residence Series
Marilyn Lake, Professor of History at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Monday, February 2, 2009
4:00-6:00PM
Seminar with Comment by Alejandro Caneque, History Department
2110 Taliaferro Hall
Refreshments will be served beginning at 3:30PM in 2108 Taliaferro Hall.
"Towards a New Genealogy of International Human Rights"
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
7:30-9:00PM
Public Lecture
0106 Francis Scott Key Hall
Reception to follow in the Merrill Room.
" 'The Discovery of Personal Whiteness is a Very Modern Thing': W.E.B. DuBois on the Personal and the Global"
Co-Sponsored Events
The Status of Theory in Chinese Film and Visual Culture Conference
St. Mary's Hall Multipurpose Room
Friday, Februay 20, 2009 through Saturday, February 21, 2009
Events begin at 9:00AM both Friday and Saturday
Please RSVP to (301)405-0213 or rmcginni@umd.edu
"Gay is Good": Kickoff for Seventh Annual LGBT Studies Conference
Roundtable Discussion moderated by Mark Meinke of Rainbow History Project
Featuring Dr. Frank Kameny founder of Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.
Art-Sociology 2309
Thursday, February 12, 2009
5:00-7:00PM
For a full schedule of events, click here: http://www.lgbts.umd.edu/lectureseries.html.
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