Contested Sites of Memory: History, Politics, Emotion, 7.5 ECTS

The Department of Culture and Aesthetics offers this course as part of the Doctoral School in the Humanities in the autumn semester 2023.

Course content

This course aims to critically investigate the material infrastructure of contemporary transnational memory culture, by exploring six sites which harbor complex memory conflicts: the monument, the ruin, the museum, the archive, the city, and the waste-site. Drawing from expertise from the fields of literary studies, art history, history, intellectual history, modern languages and archeology, the course works with transnational and multidirectional memory as a performative category, challenging a view on memory as a property of predefined groups. How is cultural memory made and unmade in and by these sites? How do memory and forgetting interplay in conflicts in and about these sites and the objects connected to them?

Learning outcomes

In order to pass the course, students should be able to:

demonstrate knowledge about cultural memory studies as an interdisciplinary research field
articulate and critically reflect on how the past is made present by differing practices of memory, within material culture and through aesthetic expressions
analyze and critically discuss the employment of memory in relation to questions of historical justice and reparation