Poynter Center Fellows

2006-07: Memory: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics | 2005-06: Nature in the Scientific and Moral Imagination | 2004-05: Ethics and Politics of Childhood | 2003-04: Democracy and Dissent

There will not be a new topic with new Fellows for 2007-08, since the Poynter Center director is on sabbatical.

2006-07: "Memory: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics"

Research Presentations by the Fellows

The 2006-07 Poynter Center Fellows presented summaries of their research on Friday, September 28, from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. in the IU Bloomington School of Law building room 215, at the corner of Third and Indiana.

Professor Edward Linenthal, Department of History and Editor, Journal of American History, moderated the colloquium. The morning sessions (10 a.m.-12 noon) focused on Memory and the American Public. Presenters and topics were:

• “Remembering the Civil Rights Struggle: Figuring Citizenship as a Visual Democracy, ” John Lucaites, Department of Communication and Culture
• “Hindutva Abroad: California Textbook Controversy,” Purnima Bose, Department of English
• “Memory and the Death Penalty,” Joseph Hoffmann, IU School of Law

The afternoon presentations (1-3 p.m.) focused on Remembering Cross-Culturally. Presenters and topics were:

• “How to tell the Story of Your Grandparents: Ethical Dilemmas of Post-Memory,” Maria Bucur-Deckard, Department of History, Russian and East European Institute
• “After History: Memory, Ethics and Literature in Post-dictatorship Argentina,” Patrick Dove, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
• “Using Dream Testimonies—In the Synapses of Historiography, Psychoanalysis, Ethics, and Brain Science,” Lynn Struve, Department of History, East Asian Languages and Cultures

The Fellows for 2006-07

Richard Miller, director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, has announced the IU faculty selected to be Poynter Center Fellows for 2006-07. The faculty will be studying the topic, "Memory: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics." The group will meet in a seminar format ten times during the year; each faculty member has a research topic on one or another facet of memory’s ethics, politics, and/or aesthetics. About this year’s fellows, Miller remarked: "It’s a wonderfully diverse range of scholars, tracking issues of memory in the United States, Eastern Europe, Argentina, China, and among South Asian Indians in the heartland of Indiana. The campus’s richness in interdisciplinary work, multiculturalism, and global studies is on full display with this group." The fellows are:

• Purnima Bose, Department of English and Director of the Cultural Studies Program
• Maria Bucur, John V. Hill Chair in East European History and Acting Director of the Russian and East European Institute
• Patrick Dove, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
• Joseph Hoffmann, IU Bloomington School of Law
• John L. Lucaites, Department of Communication and Culture
• Lynn Struve, Departments of History and of East Asian Languages and Culture

Back: Patrick Dove, Joseph Hoffmann, John Lucaites, Richard Miller, Mark Wilson, Byron Bangert
Front: Purnima Bose, Lynn Struve, Maria Bucur, Melissa Seymour

Short biographies of each fellow:

Purnima Bose is an associate professor of English, and director of the Cultural Studies Program. She also holds adjunct appointments in History, Comparative Literature, and American Studies. Her research includes publications on anti-colonial nationalism, South Asian feminism, and globalization. More recently, she has been investigating cultural nationalism and activism among South Asian immigrants in the United States. She is author of Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India. For more information see http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/faculty_profiles/bose.htm

Maria Bucur is associate professor and John V. Hill Chair in East European History and acting director for the Russian and East European Institute. Her research and teaching interests focus on European history in the first half of the twentieth century, especially social and cultural developments in Eastern Europe. She has also examined how various local communities and official state institutions in Eastern Europe tried to engineer the past, by constructing representations of wartime violence through monuments and commemorative processes. For more information, see http://mypage.iu.edu/~mbucur/

Patrick Dove is assistant professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. His research focuses on the relation between aesthetics and politics in Latin American cultural production. He will be examining literary reflections on memory in Argentina following transitions from dictatorship to democracy and from state economy to market economy. He is author of The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature. For more information, see http://www.indiana.edu/~spanport/profiles/dove.shtml

Joseph Hoffmann is the Harry Pratter Professor of Law at Indiana University - Bloomington. His scholarly work deals primarily with criminal law, criminal procedure, and the death penalty. A former Fulbright Scholar in Japan and Germany, he also writes about comparative law and society. Before joining the Indiana faculty in 1986, he served as law clerk to the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. He plans to study the importance of individual and collective memory in the criminal law, especially in terms of retributive justice and rehabilitation, as well as to compare the role that collective memory plays in the criminal law and in post-conflict societies. For more information, see http://www.law.indiana.edu/directory/hoffma.asp

John Louis Lucaites is associate professor of Communication and Culture and a member of the faculties in American Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Hutton Honors College. His teaching and research focus on the relationship between rhetoric and the performance of liberal-democratic public culture. His current work explores the relationship between rhetoric and visual culture animated by the question "What does it mean to see or to be seen as a 'citizen'?" He is author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal-Democracy (with Robert Hariman, University of Chicago Press, in press, April 2007). For more information, see http://www.indiana.edu/%7Erhetid/index.html

Lynn Struve professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Culture, was trained in Chinese language, literature, and history at the University of Washington (Seattle) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). Her work has consistently focused on the political, intellectual, and cultural history of the seventeenth century in China. In recent years she has been particularly interested in the rich autobiographical literature of that period, which was marked by severe disruptions, and especially in those writings that record the subjects’ dreams. For more information, see http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc/people/faculty/individual/struve.html

Announcement of the Poynter Center Topic for 2006-07

"Memory: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics"

The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions announces its fourth annual Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship and Seminar, focusing in 2006-07 on the theme, "Memory: Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics."

The Poynter Center Faculty Fellowship and Seminar aims to generate interdisciplinary inquiry from full-time faculty in IUB’s College of Arts and Sciences and professional schools by bringing together at least five fellows each year for 10 seminar meetings on a focal theme that has theoretical and practical dimensions. Each year’s theme is selected with an eye to coordinating interdisciplinary study around a topic of public importance.

This year’s theme will explore the concept of memory, focusing especially on its moral dimensions, its political implications, and its cultural and creative expressions. Without personal and shared memories, we have no history, no stability of identity or purpose, no material from which to draw when thinking about the present and the future. The recollection, preservation, and transmission of memory implicate moral values, political aspirations, and aesthetic possibilities.

We will examine the idea that there is an obligation to remember along with values that are at stake in the exercise of memory. Of related interest is whether there is an obligation to forget. These issues will be related to whether or how any obligation to remember (or forget) is connected to personal identity and public life. Specific research topics might include (a) the study of virtues and vices that might be attached to personal or public memory; (b) the relationship between memory, political stability, and political change; (c) memory, self-knowledge, and self-deception; (d) memory and desire; (e) the role of memory in the law; (f) memory, justice, and forgiveness; (g) the transmission of memory in educational practices and the formation of cultural and civic identity; (h) the construction and mediation of memory in, for example, journalism, film, photography, biography, autobiography, myth, letters, travel narratives, and the like; (i) and the ars memoriae, in, for example, literature, the visual and aural arts, religious practices, and commemorative events.

Proposals are welcome that draw from scientific, humanistic, and artistic approaches to these or related topics. The year’s initial selection of readings will be set by the Center’s director, who will serve as seminar leader; subsequent readings will be determined by the seminar fellows. Poynter Faculty Fellows will be expected to attend the 1-2 campus events that the Center plans to arrange around the year's theme. Fellows will also be expected to produce a publishable article or chapter that draws on their seminar discussions and research by September 1, 2007, and to present their work in fall 2007. Each fellow will be awarded $7000, one-seventh of which will be allocated upon the submission of the fellow’s chapter/article.

Applicants should send a brief cover letter, the names of two references, a project description of no more than two single-spaced pages, a one-page bibliography, and an updated CV by July 14 2006 to: Interdisciplinary Poynter Seminar Fellowship, Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, 618 E. Third St., IUB. Fellows will be selected on the basis of the strength of their proposals and their potential for contributing to the interdisciplinary nature of the seminar. Announcements will be made by the week of August 21, 2006. Inquiries should be sent to miller3@indiana.edu.

Guest Lecturers

Professor John E. Bodnar, co-director of the Center for the Study of History and Memory and Chancellor's Professor of History at Indiana University, spoke with the fellows in fall 2006. Professor Ed Linenthal from the Department of History and the Journal of American History, spoke in spring 2007.

Readings for 2006-07

Readings for the first five sessions (Fall 2006)

Week #1 Memory and Moral Obligation

a. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), “A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory,” pp. 21-44.

b. Sue Campbell, “Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value,” Philosophical Psychology vol. 19 no. 3 (June 2006), pp. 361-380.

c. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) Chapter One: “Intensive Care,” pp. 18-47.

d. W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), “Bearing Witness,” pp. 91-103.

e. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), Book 10, Chapters VII-XXV, pp. 179-192.

Week #2 Personal Memory, Personal Identity, and Psychological Well-Being

a. W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), “Memory and Identity,” pp. 1-13.

b. Alvin Greenberg, The Dog of Memory: A Family Album of Secrets and Silences (Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2002), “The Dog of Memory,” pp. 49-59.

c. Maxine Scates, “The Dreaming Back,” from Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis, ed. Kathryn Rhett. (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), pp. 193-219.

d. John D. Barbour, “Judging and Not Judging Parents,” from The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 73-98.

e. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Touchstone, 1998), “The Lost Mariner,” pp. 23-42.

f. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1962), pp. 3-5.

Recommended:

• John D. Barbour, The Conscience of the Autobiographer (London: MacMillan, 1992), Chapter Two: “Conscience and Truthfulness,” pp. 8-36.

Week #3 Shared Memories: Collective Identities and Collective Accountability

a. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), Chapter Six: “Reminiscing,” pp. 104-121.

b. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), Chapter Five: “The Collective Memory of the Family,” pp. 54-83.

c. W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), Chapter Two: “Memory, Accountability, and Political Community,” pp. 55-71.

d. Susan-Mary Grant, “Raising the Dead: War, Memory, and American National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 11 no. 4 (2005), pp. 509-529.

e. Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), “Conclusion: Not Just Memory,” pp. 137-147.

Week #4 Public Memory and Its Representations

a. Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time” from Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 17-44.

b. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), “Introduction: The Texture of Memory,” pp. 1-15.

c. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Chapter Six: “Remembering to Remember: Photography as Figure of Contemporary Atrocity Memories,” pp. 171-201.

d. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” and “The Memory Debate: An Introduction,” pp. 3-9, 13-20.

e. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Chapter Six: “Memory Sites in an Expanded Field: The Memory Park in Buenos Aires,” pp. 94-109.

f. Memorials Online:Virtual Memorials, Remembering Our Dead, Faces of the Fallen, 911 Living Memorial, American Memorials.

Week #5 Politics and Memory: Violence, Justice, and Reconciliation

a. Stephen Howard Browne, “Arendt, Eichmann, and the Politics of Remembrance,” from Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips. (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 45-64.

b. W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), “The Forgetting of Justice,” pp. 143-163.

c. Ronald C. Slye, “Amnesty, Truth, and Reconciliation: Reflections on the South African Amnesty Process,” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp.170-188.

d. Anna Krylova, “Dancing on the Graves of the Dead: Building a World War II Memorial in Post-Soviet Russia,” from Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, ed. Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 83-102.

e. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 2000), “The Dishonoring of Arthur Harris,” pp. 323-325.

Week #6 The “Ethical Turn”: Memory, Trauma, and Testimony

a. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. (New York: Zone, 2000), Chapter One: “The Witness,” pp. 15-39.

b. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, trans. James E. Irby. (New York: New Directions, 1962), “Funes the Memorious,” pp. 59-66.

c. Tununa Mercado, In a State of Memory, trans. Peter Kahn. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 28-40, 65-89, 96-107.

d. Jacabo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Tony Talbot. (New York: Vintage Press, 1982), Chapters 1, 4, 7, 9, 10, & Epilogue, pp. 3-11, 32-41, 81-92, 105-141, 159-164.

e. Ernst Van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), Chapter Two: “Testimonies and the Limits of Representation,” pp. 41-64.

Recommended:

• Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Chapter One: “Present Pasts: Media Politics, Amnesia,” pp. 11-29.

• Dominick La Capra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), Chapter Two: “Revisiting the Historian’s Debate: Mourning and Genocide,” pp. 43-72.

Week #7 The Criminal Trial as Space for Memory Work

a. Martha Minnow, Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Chapter One: “Memory and Hate: Are There Lessons from Around the World?,” pp. 14-30.

b. Jeffrie Murphy, “Forgiveness and Resentment,” and “Mercy and Legal Justice,” from Forgiveness and Mercy, Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 14-34 & 162-186.

c. Austin Sarat, “When Memory Speaks: Remembrance and Revenge in Unforgiven,” Indiana Law Journal vol. 77 no. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 307-329.

d. Jody Lyneé Madeira, “Blood Relations: The Formation of Collective Memory and the Resolution of Cultural Trauma in the Prosecution and Execution of Timothy McVeigh,” unpublished manuscript based in Ph.D. dissertation, 2006, pp. 1-44.

e. Robert Cover, “Violence and the World,” The Yale Law Journal vol. 95 (1986), pp. 1601-1629.

Recommended:

• Shoshana Felman, “Forms of Judicial Blindness: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions,” from History, Memory, and the Law, eds. Austin Sarat & Thomas R. Kearns. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 25-93.

Week #8 Gender and Memory

a. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 3-20 & 87-136.

b. Barbara Harlow,Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), Chapter Eleven: “Writing Human Rights,” pp. 243-256.

c. Katherine Jolluck, “The Nation’s Pain and Women’s Shame: Polish Women and Wartime Violence,” from Gender and War in 20th Century Eastern Europe, ed. Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 193-219.

d. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry vol. 17 no. 4 (Summer 1991), pp. 773-797.

e. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Chapter Three: “Giving Proper Burial, Reconfiguring Space and Time,” pp. 95-119.

Week #9 Dream Memory, Brain Science, and Psychological Insight into Humanist Research

a. Kelly Bulkeley, The Wondering Brain: Thinking about Religion with and beyond Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Routledge, 2005), Chapter One: “Dreams and Visions,” pp. 13-52.

b. Lynn Hunt, “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Historical Thought,” from A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. Llyod Kramer and Sarah Maza. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 337-355.

c. Carla Gerona, Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), Introduction: “Mining Dreams,” pp. 1-7.

d. Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Introduction, Chapter Eight: “The Almond and the Seahorse: Neuroscientific Perspectives,” and Chapter Six: “Apollinaire, Breton and the Surrealists: Automatism and Aleatory Memory,” pp. 1-5, 135-152, 101-116.

e. Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 3-16, 206-209.

f. Lynn A. Struve, “Dreaming and Self-Search during the Ming Collapse: The Xue Xiemeng xiansheng biji, 1642-1646,” forthcoming in International Journal of Chinese Studies (Paris) vol. 93 (2007).

Recommended:

• Stewart Gabel, “Monitoring the State of the Self in Dreams: Historical Perspectives and Theoretical Implications,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought vol. 14 (1991), pp. 425-451.

Week #10 Rhetoric, Public Memory, and the Visual

a. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” from Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253-264.

b. Robert Hairman and John Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of 'Accidental Napalm,'” Critical Studies in Media Communication vol. 20 no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 35-66.

c. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembrance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), Chapter One: “Camera Images and National Meanings” and Afterword, pp. 19-43, 255-259.

d. Sigrid Weigel, Body-Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1996), Chapter Ten: “Readability: Benjamin’s Place in Contemporary Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial and Corporeal Memory,” pp. 146-157.

e. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), Chapter Three: “The Anatomy of Lynching,” pp. 81-113.

f. Barbie Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory,” from Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 157-186.