As part of our upcoming celebration of the many publications by members of our department in 2016 and 2016 this Friday (4 PM, at Alumni House, 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401), we are featuring several of the books that will be celebrated.
This featured title is by Professor Emeritus Patrick Hutton.
In this book, Hutton provides a comprehensive overview of the intense and sustained work on the relationship between collective memory and history, retracing the royal roads pioneering scholars have traveled in their research and writing on this topic: notably, the politics of commemoration (purposes and practices of public remembrance); the changing uses of memory worked by new technologies of communication (from the threshold of literacy to the digital age); the immobilizing effects of trauma upon memory (with particular attention to the remembered legacy of the Holocaust). He follows with an analysis of the implications of this scholarship for our thinking about history itself, with attention to such issues as the mnemonics of historical time, and the encounter between representation and experience in historical understanding. His book provides insight into the way interest in the concept of memory – as opposed to long-standing alternatives, such as myth, tradition, and heritage – has opened new vistas for scholarship not only in cultural history but also in shared ventures in memory studies in related fields in the humanities and social sciences.
Please join us this afternoon at Alumni House! Refreshments will be served.
