COURSE DESCRIPTION
This seminar explores the ways Europeans have remembered (and forgotten) the traumas of the twentieth century: war, genocide, dictatorship, and ethnic cleansing. We will draw upon historical works, oral histories, memoirs, films, and novels to understand the struggle over the meaning of these events. The course is organized around a series of conflicts and their retellings: the First World War, the Holodomor (the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine), the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, the Francoist Dictatorship in Spain, and the Yugoslav Wars. We will center on themes of collective trauma, individual versus national memories, the role of amnesia and fantasy in collective memory, the ongoing reckoning with colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism in Europe, and the politics of the past.
This is an upper-level history seminar with an emphasis on student preparation and participation. In some ways you will find it more difficult than a 100 or 200-level history course. We’ll be reading sophisticated works by important historians and engaging with challenging primary sources. You’ll have to do work on your own to prepare for class discussions. There will be frequent moments when you will need to step up to share your thoughts on the reading in written form and to share short presentations with the class. But in other ways, you may find this course easier from others. There aren’t a lot of exams (indeed, there aren’t any). And there is a lot of space for you to develop your own ideas. I’ll make short presentations to introduce topics (as will you as well). But most of our time will be spent in discussion.
The course presumes a cursory knowledge of the conflicts of 20th c. Europe. We will spend more time discussing cultural memory and historiography then summarizing events. For those who are looking for an introduction to the conflicts that we discuss – or for reference material to understand details – I’ll share a couple general texts that I like.
And let’s add a word on the era of COVID 19. The conditions of this spring – and the necessity of online class meetings – will require some adjustments for all of us. Let’s work together to stay engaged and make this an excellent experience for student and professor alike.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of the course students will be able to:
- Describe important works, concepts, and debates over history and memory
- Describe changes and continuities in the cultural memory of a series of important conflicts in 20th Europe
- Carry out effective research on historical memory
- Apply concepts of memory studies to the analysis of particular “works of memory”