How is memory formed, shaped, and transmitted?

Kata Gellen, Associate Professor, German Studies and Director of Jewish Studies

How has Holocaust memory changed over time? How can we compare the experiences and creative output of survivors (first generation), their children (second generation), and their grandchildren (third generation)? What forms have these memorial acts taken, what stories have they told, and what images have they transmitted? How do they grapple with the fading of lived experience in the face of the need to continue to transmit memory? This course we will focus on three forms of Holocaust memory. Memoirs, broadly conceived, include autobiographical writing (Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, Ruth Kluger), a graphic novel (Art Spiegelman’s Maus), and a novel (Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness). Memorials include public monuments such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and museums such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Movies include early documentaries, popular fiction films, and recent attempts at intergenerational reckoning through cinema. Throughout the course, we will remain attentive to conditions of production, audience, and context: who is creating the memorial act, who is the audience for it, and into what political, national, linguistic, and cultural environment is it born. We will also explore the tremendously productive field of memory studies, much of which has grown out of Holocaust studies. Theories such as multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg), postmemory (Marianne Hirsch), and the idea of the past as collective construction (Aleida Assmann) will inform our discussions.

Lauren Ginsberg, Associate Professor, Classical Studies and Theater Studies 

Queen Cleopatra ruled Egypt over two thousand years ago, but she remained very much alive cultural memory from the moment of her death to today. How does someone become such a global icon? What factors go shaping how someone is remembered? Who gets a say in how to tell their story … and what other possible stories get suppressed in that process? This course will teach students the tools through which historians piece together the life of Cleopatra through the fragments of data that survive to us. It will also introduce students to how the memory of this once powerful queen has been shaped and reshaped in the modern world by different communities, artists, and individuals all with their own ideas about who Cleopatra was and why she should matter to us. From the ancient Romans to the medieval Islamic world, from Shakespeare to Hollywood, each era finds new meaning in this enigmatic ancient woman. This course involves several practicum workshops throughout the term which give students hands-on access to museum quality replica artifacts and authentic archival materials to hone their tools of analysis. The course culminates in an archival project.

Dominika Baran, Associate Professor, English

Memory, narrative, and identity are inextricably linked with each other, both from the perspective of individual experience and in the context of social and cultural life of communities. Who we believe we are is built on how we understand the story of our lives, and that story is made up of a sequence of memories. But memories are not photographs permanently imprinted in our minds; in fact, science now believes that we remake memories every time we recall them. Memory, in other words, is a living, dynamic, continuously evolving process, rather than an immutable object. Individual identities, meanwhile, are always shaped and influenced by social interaction, and much of social interaction entails storytelling. In this course, we will use the tools developed in linguistic anthropology and related fields – such as discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and approaches to language and identity – to explore how shared storytelling, and thus shared remembering, shapes group and individual identities. We will examine how everyday narratives that emerge in conversation are both products of shared memories, and help to remake those memories with each retelling. We will also consider how individuals reflect on their own sense of self as shaped by their memories when engaging in the interactional activity of shared remembering with others. We will view interaction from multiple perspectives: face-to-face casual conversations, online and social media engagement, public events, talking with older relatives at family events or meeting new friends in the first weeks of college. Students will have the opportunity to contribute their own experiences with memory and storytelling, and explore the material through diverse writing assignments and projects.

Cross-lists: CULANTH 178CNS, LINGUIST 178CNS

Adriane Lentz-Smith, Associate Professor, History

Through works of history, fiction, and memoir, this course will explore themes—family, displacement, violence, and memory—that cut across US history and human experience. We will tease out the various strands of culture, class, geography, and identity that shape US history. Even more, we will analyze how writers—historians and otherwise—draw on the entangled past to make sense of the world. As a final assignment, students will produce their own piece of historical writing, rooted in original research.

Cross-list: AAAS 1XXCN

Daria Smirnova, Lecturing Fellow, Slavic and Eurasian Studies

This course explores how the socialist past is remembered and debated in contemporary literature and film from the former Eastern Bloc and the former Soviet Union. Focusing on the period after the collapse of state socialism, the course examines how writers and filmmakers respond to the loss of political projects, shared futures, and everyday worlds once taken for granted. The material spans cultural production from East Germany, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Rather than treating socialism as a finished chapter, the course shows it as a past that continues to intrude on the present through memory, nostalgia, and unresolved historical tensions. While grounded in specific historical and regional contexts, these texts also raise broader questions about how societies remember political rupture, narrate loss, and assign meaning to the past. Students are encouraged to think critically about nostalgia not simply as longing for the past, but as a way of making sense of the contradictions and afterlives of socialism in the present, and as a lens for understanding memory work in societies or individuals shaped by rupture, displacement, and ideological change more broadly.

Historical context, theoretical approaches, and primary texts are introduced in tandem throughout the course. Assignments are designed to develop close reading and analytical skills while situating texts within their historical contexts. We will examine both “how” and “what” the authors say. 
We will try to understand whether specific genres work better in representing memory. We will examine what the texts have in common and how they differ, and whether those differences are (possibly) country-specific, genre-specific, or author-specific. 

Students will take structured reading notes when reading the assigned texts at home (graded for completion), lead a small-group discussion based on professor-approved questions, and complete either a final project or a final paper. All final work proceeds through multiple drafts, with emphasis on developing clear thesis statements, engagement with secondary sources, and constructing strong, well-supported arguments.

Shambhavi Kaul, Associate Professor of the Practice, Art, Art History, and Visual Studies

How does cinema form, shape and transmit memory? How does it preserve, challenge or reshape our understanding of the past. This course examines the dynamic relationship between cinema and memory. Through considerations of personal and collective memory, we will understand cinema as both an archive and as a form of creative memorialization. Through screenings, readings, and discussions, students will reflect critically on the ethics and aesthetics of remembering and forgetting on screen. In addition to weekly reflections on course materials, students will engage in simple film production exercises in preparation for creating a final film project exploring memory and cinema.

Elizabeth Marsh, Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience

Understanding the feats and failures of memory in everyday situations. Exploration of the use and misuse of memory of interest across professions (e.g., medicine, law, advertising, education), via demonstrations, lecture, and readings. Topics include repression, how to study for exams, remembering names, early childhood memories, amnesia, photographic memory, eyewitness testimony, and pharmacological effects.  

Madeline Sutton, Assistant Professor, Thompson Writing Program

How does memory shape the ways you write and understand the world around you? How can you use writing and research as methods of inquiry into the past, present, and future? And how can you render memories into impactful stories with the power to inspire social action?

In this class, we’ll explore the complex relationships between writing, research, and memory. We’ll examine the many ways that writing connects us to the world and to one another across disciplines, professions, decades, cultures, and communities. By studying the role of personal and collective memory in research-based and multimodal writing, we’ll examine how writing is shaped by context—who we’re writing for, what questions we’re asking, what kinds of evidence we’re using—and how effective writers make strategic rhetorical choices that reflect those contexts. As writers, we’ll approach memory as a “heuristic” (Sharon Crowley)—a tool for rhetorical invention, decision-making, and problem-solving.

You’ll take up this work in three major projects: a virtual museum exhibit, which uses historical, archival materials to make an argument rooted in peoples’ experiences in the past; a qualitative research project, which uses primary data to develop an argument based in peoples’ everyday experiences; and a public argument, which crafts a multimodal remediation to reach a public audience. In addition to weekly writing assignments that build toward the major projects, you’ll compose reflective journals and self-assessments, participate in peer review workshops, and collaborate on in-class discussions and activities. Together, we’ll study how researchers formulate and investigate questions, locate and evaluate information, tell stories with data, develop positions on intercultural and interdisciplinary topics, and present findings effectively. By doing so, you’ll gain tools and approaches to write purposefully, think critically, and respond thoughtfully to the demands of academic and public discourse.

Description forthcoming.

Eliana Schonberg, Professor of the Practice, Thompson Writing Program

What makes a home? Is it a place? The people in it? The things you have? If you leave a home, can you return? Or can you take your home with you, like a turtle its shell, through your memories of it? How many homes can one person have? Can homes be transplanted? Rebuilt? Can you make a new home from scratch? As you embark on your second semester away from home, you may feel as though you’re already well-established in a new home at Duke, or you may not; in either case, this is the ideal time to develop ways of thinking and writing about what home means to you and to others and how your memories play a role. In this Writing 120, we'll consider “home” and memory from anthropological, poetic, and sociological perspectives, and you'll get to explore different types of writing genres and strategies as we do. We’ll read excerpts from authors as diverse as essayists Viet Thanh Nguyen and Rebecca Solnit, poet Elizabeth Bishop, and anthropologist Aihwa Ong. 

In addition to informal writings in response to readings, you’ll have the opportunity to write three formal assignments: a 5-page personal narrative about your concept of “home”; an interview with someone from a very different place or time period to understand a very different concept of home; and an extended essay in which you incorporate your narrative, the answers of your interview subject, and appropriate scholarly sources to help you understand your own and your interviewee’s experiences from a new perspective. Finally, you will create a portfolio that highlights your accomplishments in the course, selecting from among your formal and informal writings for the portfolio including a final self-reflection that analyzes your writing and reflects critically on your writing challenges and successes.