The Istituto Italiano di Cultura in cooperation with CCGES, the European Centre of Excellence at the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, the University of Bologna and the Canadian cluster of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture) is pleased to present a roundtable discussion entitled “Memory Studies and the Identity Problem: A Cross Reading of European and Canadian Cultural Traditions”. This event will take place on Tuesday, September 7th from 6:30-8:00 pm at the Munk Centre for International Studies (1 Devonshire Place on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto).
All are welcome, but attendees are asked to RSVP before September 4th to 416 921-3802 ext. 221 or iictoronto@esteri.it
Memory Studies and the Identity Problem will be addressed by four experts on the subject: Profs. Julia Creet, Shelley Hornstein (CCGES) and Andreas Kitzmann (CCGES) from York University, and Prof. Elena Lamberti from the University of Bologna.
The In a time of global migrations after twentieth-century wars, how does cultural memory strengthen or undermine social and political cohesion?
The points of departure for this panel are two books: Memories and Representations of War: The Case of World War I and World War II, edited by Elena Lamberti and Vita Fortunati, (New York/Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); and Memory and Migration–Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, edited by Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming Sept. 2010). Both collections of essays explore the complex cultural identity/ies of Canada and the European Union and the bonds between the two political entities through individual, institutional and artistic expressions of cultural memory.
Panelists bio:
JULIA CREET teaches memory studies and literary nonfiction in the Department of English at York University. She is the co-editor (with Andreas Kitzmann) of Memory and Migration—multidisciplinary approaches to memory studies (University of Toronto Press 2010), and the producer and director of a documentary, “MUM,” about the memoirs of a holocaust survivor who tried to forget. She has published numerous essays on identity, memory and testimony in various academic and literary journals including differences, Applied Semiotics, Paradoxa, English Studies in Canada, Resources for Feminist Research, Toronto Life, West Coast Line and Exile. Several of her essays have been translated into Hungarian and Polish and others published in essay collections in Sweden and the Netherlands. Julia Creet’s current documentary/book project is a genealogy of genealogy, a historicization of the “innate” need to know one’s past.
SHELLEY HORNSTEIN is Professor of Architectural History & Visual Culture at York University and was the recipient of the prestigious Walter L. Gordon Fellowship in 20008-09. Her research examines issues of place and spatial politics in architectural environments (both real and imagined). She has co-edited Capital Culture A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (2000); Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (2002), and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust 2003). She is currently completing a book entitled: Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place to be published by Ashgate in 2011.
ANDREAS KITZMANN is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University. He received his PhD in comparative literature from McGill University and has written widely on the impact of communications technology on the construction and practice of identity, electronic communities, and the influence of new media on narrative conventions. His publications include Saved from Oblivion: The Place of Media, from Diaries to Web Cams (Peter Lang, 2004), Hypertext: The Straight Story (Peter Lang, 2006), and, as co-editor, Memory Work (Peter Lang, 2005).
ELENA LAMBERTI teaches American and Canadian Literature at the University of Bologna. Her areas of research include: Anglo- American Modernism, literature and technology, Cultural Memory, war literature. She has published several essays on English and Anglo-American Modernism (Ford, Joyce, Pound, Hemingway), as well as Anglo-Canadian culture of the late 20th Century (Coupland, Cronenberg, McLuhan). She served in the European Thematic Network ‘Acume: Cultural memory and European Identity’, (2002-2005), and was a member of the European Think Tank on “The Images of Europe”, sponsored by the European Commission Educational DG (2005-2007). Among her books are: Marshall McLuhan: tra letteratura, arte e media (Bruno Mondadori, 2000); Prove di un senso critico: saggi di Ford Madox Ford (with V. Fortunati, Alinea, 2001); Interpreting/Translating European Modernism. A Comparative Approach (Compositori, 2001). She is currently completing the volume Marshall Mcluhan’s Critical Writing. Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies (University of Toronto Press. Forthcoming, 2011).
Date: Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Time: 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Venue: Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto
