The uneven distribution of the devastating losses of the last years due to the Covid-19 pandemic starkly revealed the legacies of structural racism, inequality, war, poverty, and climate change.  Acts of mourning and memorialization also need to acknowledge these compounding inequalities, often dating back centuries.

Cultural studies experts Hortense Spillers and Marianne Hirsch discussed the connections between these traumatic histories and the responses of affected communities on both sides of the Atlantic. They asked whether and how art, literature, architecture and public action can inspire struggles for repair and reparation, raising also the implications of the politics of refusal and abolition that some have recently adopted as a more appropriate reaction to continued dispossession and neglect. Moderated by Professor Irene Kacandes, German Studies and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.

Marianne Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020), both co-authored with Leo Spitzer, and the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory (2019). Hirsch is professor emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is a former President of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Currently, she co-directs the Zip Code Memory Project, dedicated to finding community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.

Hortense J. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Emerita of English at Vanderbilt University. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Brandeis, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory, and Cornell Universities. She has also served as a guest professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University during academic year 2002-03 and for two consecutive years during tri-semester terms at the John F. Kennedy Center for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, 2000 and 2001. A recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them, grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she has been a fellow at both the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, and the Center for the Study of the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto. While at Haverford, she was chair of the English Department for two years before moving to Cornell where she joined the Norton projects by serving as one of the period editors of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. At Vanderbilt, where she joined the English faculty there in AY 2006-07, she founded The A-Line Journal, an independent online magazine devoted to examination of national and world events through a theoretical lens. 

Irene Kacandes was educated at Harvard University, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) and the Freie Universität (Berlin). Kacandes holds the Dartmouth Professorship #2 at Dartmouth College, where she teaches in the fields of German Studies, Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jewish Studies. Author or editor of nine books, her most recent publications include Let’s Talk About Death (Prometheus, 2015) and Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn, 2017). Her reflection on her paternal family’s fate in Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (Nebraska, 2009, 2012), proposed a new genre, the paramemoir, for the study of personal material. Just released is the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter 2022). Kacandes has held a number of top positions in international professional organizations, including the presidency of the German Studies Association and of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She also runs a book series on “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter, Germany.

This event is part of a series called “Humanities for Humans”, presented in partnership with the Walter de Gruyter Foundation (Berlin). Across eight sessions — four in-person and four virtual — the series brings people together to help generate a better understanding of what the humanities are and what role they can play in today’s complex world.