The Department of Slavonic Studies is helping sponsor the international conference ‘Places of Amnesia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Forgotten Pasts’. The event will feature over 70 presenters from 20 countries who will explore how societies forget, with particular attention to historico-cultural contexts in Russia and Central Europe.
The conference seeks to develop a dialogue between subject experts, established scholars and young researchers, who will examine the ways in which historical events, people, places and cultural texts can escape representations of the past. It seeks to establish whether specific sites can be viewed as loci of forgetting or, recalling and critiquing Pierre Nora's concept of lieux de mémoire, as places of amnesia.
‘Places of Amnesia’ focuses on the following general questions: How do the intersections of personal biography with historical events influence the way in which social groups remember and forget? What happens to the knowledge of events when there are no witnesses left? How do ceremonies and public events filter memory and amnesia?
The programme of the conference, which is subject to change, can be found in pdf format HERE. It will feature two keynote speakers:
- 5th April – Professor Carlo Ginzburg (UCLA/University of Pisa) on Unintentional Revelations. Rescuing the Past, Obliquely.
- 6th April – Dr Paul Connerton (University of Cambridge) on The Inside and the Outside. Can the Human Body Be a Place of Amnesia?
The conference is organised by Daria Mattingly, PhD Candidate in Slavonic Studies; Gruia Badescu, PhD Candidate in Architecture (Cambridge) and Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography (Oxford); Elena Zezlina, PhD Candidate in Italian; and Maria Ana Correia, PhD Candidate in Anthropology. It is organised under the aegis of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, with funding from the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Cambridge and the Centre for East European Language Based Studies (CEELBAS).
