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P ast (Im)Perfect Continuous.
Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII
June 26-28, 2018
University of Rome, “La Sapienza”
conference
PROGRAMME.
Tuesday 26– Centro Studi Americani, via Michelangelo Caetani 32
8.30-9.30: Registration
9.30-10: Opening Remarks
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10-11.15: Keynote Address
Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University)
“Stateless Figures: Postmemory, Art and Politics.”
Chair: Giorgio Mariani
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11.15-11.30: Coffee Break
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11.30-1.30: Parallel Sessions
. 1. Gendered Postmemories 1 – Memory as Art
Chair: Barbara Ronchetti
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Carla Subrizi: “Trauma e intimità: corpi transculturali e performatività della memoria nelle Cells di Louise Bourgeois”
Rachel Gelfand: “Terezín Art: A (Queer) Family Postmemory”
Zsuzsi Flohr: “Woven Memories: Post-Shoah Third Generation Narratives and Postmemory from an Artistic Practice Perspective”
Aleksandra Ubertowska: “Trajectories of Memory: Art Interventions in Post-
Genocidal Space (Anna Baumgart’s and Rachel Whiteread’s Acts of
Holocaust Commemoration)”
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. 2. Postmemorial Children
Chair: Stefania De Lucia
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Alexander White: “Postmemory and Identity: The Inevitable Actuality of the Post-
Memorial Child and the Search for Potentiality in Henri Raczymow’s Writing
the Book of Esther”
Laura Talarico: “Re-defining Postmemory: Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock”
Elèna Mortara: “Between Memory and Postmemory: Of My Mother’s Face as a Young
Girl, and Other Stories”
Brian Edgar: “A Theoretical-Personal Investigation of Postmemory of the Japanese
Occupation of Hong Kong”
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. 3. Postmemory on the Move – Memory Crossing Borders
Chair: Davide Crosara
Chloe Wells: “A Longing That Crosses the Generation Gap? Articulating the
Postmemory of a Lost Finnish Place”
Malgorzata Lukianow: “Post-Kresy: Politicization and Postmemory of Former Polish
Eastern Borderlands”
Nikolina Zidek: “Neverending (Hi)Story: Intergenerational Transmission of Memory
among the Croatian Diaspora in Argentina”
Vera Herold: “The Lissaboner Deutsche: Glimpses from the Periphery on the Nuances of Bystanding"
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1.30-2.30: Lunch Break (catered at CSA)
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2.30-4.30: Parallel Sessions
. 4. Intertextual Postmemories
Chair: Pilar Martinez Benedì
Daniela Henke: “Commemorating the Unexperienced. Jean Améry’s Holocaust
Memory and Body Philosophy in the Postmemorial Novel Morbus
Kitahara by Christoph Ransmayr”
Emily-Rose Baker: “Inter-Generational Nightmares: Postmemory and Poland”
Alice Balestrino: “Another Break in the Wall: ‘Gravestone Rubbing’ and Postmemorial Agency in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Book-Sculpture Tree of Codes”
Riccardo Capoferro: “Heart of Darkness and the Memory of the Holocaust”
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. 5. Gendered Postmemories 2 - Feminine Practices of Memorializing Traumas
Chair: Laura Talarico
Anna Di Giusto: “Women in Black and Postmemory of the Balkans”
Nathalie Segeral: “Gendering Trauma: (Non-)Motherhood and Postmemory
in Three Francophone Narratives”
Barbara Ronchetti: “A Choral Narration of the ‘Signs of History’. Lyudmila E. Ulitskaya:
A Female Voice on World War II and the Stalin Era”
. 6. Military Postmemories - Remembering WWII Battles
Chair: Devor de Pascalis
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Juliane Bockwoldt: “Remembering the Tirpitz in Europe”
Marco Malvestio: “‘If Necessary for Years, If Necessary Alone’: History, Memory, and
Fiction in Contemporary Representations of Dunkirk”
Alison Starr: “Military Mortuary Spaces of the Asia Pacific War: the Spatial Legacy of Hosting Enemy War Dead”
Valerio Cordiner: “Nazis dans le plateau. Résister en province d’après Bergounioux”
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​ 4.30-5.00: Coffee Break
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5.00- 6.30: Parallel Sessions:
. 7. Political Postmemory - Commemorating WWII in National Discourses I
Chair: Jonathan Vincent
Ana Ljubojevic: “Contested Narratives of Bleiburg in the Context of WWII
Remembrance in Croatia”
Mateusz Mazzini: “‘You’re Not One of Us’: Postmemory and Memory as Issues of
Nationhood - Case Study of Poland’s Mnemonic Landscape 2015-2018”
Konstantinos Kornetis: “Postmemory of the 1940s and Political Appropriations of
the Past in Crisis-Ridden Greece”
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. 8. Visitors and Memory Spaces: Shaping the "Post-witness" in the 21st Century
Chair: Dario Miccoli
Diana Popescu: “The Postmemorial Dimension of Museum Exhibition Design: An
Audience Research Study of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War
Museum, London”
Xenia Tsiftsi: “Re-membrance or Dis-memberment?Trauma, Victimhood and Space
Appropriation in Berlin’s Holocaust Tower”
Doreen Pastor: “The Long Shadow of Auschwitz: Postmemory at German Memorial
Sites"
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. 9. Postmemory in Graphic Narratives
Chair: Riccardo Capoferro
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Stefano Romagnoli: “Manga as Postmemory: Images of the WWII by Postwar
Generations”
Alessio Aletta: “La seconda guerra mondiale e la memorialistica a fumetti: Mausdi Art
Spiegelman e Hadashi no Gen diKeiji Nakazawa”
Nicola Paladin: “A Future-Oriented Past:Contemporary Contaminations in Garth Ennis
and Kieron Gillen’s WWII Comics”
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6.30: Tour of the nearby Ghetto of Rome​
Wednesday 27– Edificio "Marco Polo", Circonvallazione Tiburtina 4
9.00: Opening Remarks
Arianna Punzi – Head of the Department of European, American and Intercultural
Studies, Sapienza Università di Roma
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9.15-10.30: Keynote Address
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Anne Roche (Aix-Marseille Université)
“Leur Siècle”
Chair: Valerio Cordiner
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10.30-11.00: Coffee Break
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11.00-12.30: Parallel Sessions
. 10. Postmemories of the Perpetrators
Room: T01
Chair: Alice Balestrino
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Mario Panico: “Italiani Brava Gente. Postmemory and Legacy of the Fascist
Period in Italy”
Susanne Luhmann: “From Postmemory to Postknowledge? Representing
Familial Legacies of Nazi Perpetration”
Guido Bartolini: “The Memory of the Axis War in Italian Narrative: Between a
Critical Identification with the Perpetrators and an Unethical Dismissal
of ‘Our’Responsibility”
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. 11.The Liberal Imaginary of WWII Between Fact and Fiction
Room: T02
Chair: Paolo Simonetti
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Giorgio Mariani: “The Human SmokeControversy, and Beyond: Remembering the
Unpopular Pacifism of WW2”
Jonathan Vincent: “World War II Memory and the Postwar Liberal Tradition in American Literary History”
Tom Vanassche: “Screen Memory as Postmemory? Commemorating the Resistance across Borders and Between Fiction and History”
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. 12. Italian Postmemories
Room: T03
Chair: Rosy Colombo
Giuliana Muscio: “Rossellini’s Paisa’ as an Instant-Postmemory”
Giulia Falistocco: “La vita in tempo di pace e in tempo di guerra: la
memoria generazionale non condivisa
Sandra Terracina: “AssociazioneProgetto Memoria”
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12.30-2.30: Lunch Break
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2.30-4.00: Parallel Sessions
. 13. Finding Narrative Forms to Tell the Untellable
Room: T01
Chair: Irene Ranzato
Alessandra Crotti: “‘But Footfalls Echo in the Memory...’: Howard Jacobson,
Comedy and the Modes of Remembrance”
Tommaso Gennaro: “‘Un’ombra diventata eterna’. La memoria esposta della
seconda guerra mondiale”
Stephanie Munyard: “Translating the Word Beyond Speech: Revising Memory
in Joseph Joffo's Un Sac de Billes”
Szidonia Haragos: "The Postmemory of Atrocity in Laszlo Names' Son of Saul
(2015)
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. 14. Postmemory and Forgetfulness
Room: T02
Chair: Cristina Giorcelli
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Dario Miccoli: “Forgotten (Post)memories? World War Two, the Holocaust and
the Jews of North Africa”
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir: “The Inheritance of Forgetting: Narratives of
Postmemory”
Rafael Pérez Baquero: “Postmemory and Forgetfulness: Why the Victims Had to
Wait the Third Generation?”
Serguey Ehrlich: “From National Pride to Global Empathy and Admiration: Memory
and Post-Memory of the Second World War during
Transition from Modern Nation-State to Global Information
Civilization”
. 15. Political Postmemory - Commemorating WWII in National Discourses II
Room: T03
Chair: Mario Panico
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Agostina Latino: “Il diritto alla memoria nell’ordinamento internazionale”
Igor Milić: “A Postmodernist Review of EU Memory of War”
José Luís Pimenta Lopes: “‘Frontier of Peace’: The Memorialization of Portugal’s
Role in WWII and its Palimpsests”
Sanja Roić: “Un trauma cronico: I Balcani occidentali e la memoria dellla seconda guerra mondiale”
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4.30-5.00: Coffee Break
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5.00-6.30: Parallel Sessions
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. 16. Alternate Histories, Uchronic Postmemory
Room: T01
Chair: Giorgio Mariani
Paolo Simonetti: “Inventing (Post)Memory, Writing (Non)Fiction:
Jerzy Kosinski, Philip Roth, and the Legacy of World War II”
Elena Lamberti: “The Plot Against America: Literature, Postmemory and Civic
Awareness”
Umberto Rossi: “Past Conditional: Enrico Brizzi's La nostra guerra as an Exercise in Alternate Post-Memory”
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. 17. Pop- Memory - Postmemory in Popular Culture
Room: T02
Chair: Andrea Fenice
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Susan Winnett: “Drawing Out the Memories of the Greatest Generation: C. Tyler’s You’ll Never Know”
Pascale Bos: “Pulping the Holocaust: Early Popular American Holocaust Memory
and Its Global Reach”
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. 18. Beyond WWII - Other Postmemories I
Room: T03
Chair: Nicola Paladin
Elia Romera Figueroa: “Singer-Songwriters Voicing Postmemory: The
Way Rozalén Found Justice for Justo”
Sciltian Gastaldi: “Photography as a Medium of Transgenerational
Transmission of Trauma Between WWII and the Lead Years. Different
Cultural Aims in the Writings of Giampaolo Mattei and Benedetta
Tobagi”
Alessandra Pellegrini De Luca: “Second-hand Trauma of the Anni di Piombo:
Resistance and Left-Wing Terrorism in Contemporary Italian
Literature”
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6.30: Tour of the historical neighborhood of San Lorenzo
8.00: Conference Dinner at "Efeso il Barrocciaio"
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Thursday 28– Edificio "Marco Polo", Circonvallazione Tiburtina 4
9.15-10.30: Keynote Address
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Sandro Portelli (Sapienza – Università di Roma)
“The Fosse Ardeatine Massacre: Memory as History”
Chair: Barbara Ronchetti
10.30-11: Coffee Break
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11-12.30: Parallel Sessions
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. 19. Visiting Memorial Sites I - Postmemory as Touristic Experience
Room: T01
Chair: Barbara Miceli
Verbena Giambastiani, Andrea Schlosser: “Between Propriety and Self-
Representation: Dark Tourism and Holocaust Remembrance in the
Age of Selfie Culture”
Catalina Botez: “‘Unlosing Lost Places’ in Post-Holocaust Europe. Travel
and ‘Anti-Tourism’ as Tools of Multidirectional Memory in W. G.
Sebald’s Austerlitz”
Tanja Schult: “Making Memory Matter: The Audio Walk Gusen”
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. 20. Visiting Memorial Sites II - Ruins and Artefacts of Postmemory
Room: T02
Chair: Marco Petrelli
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Fabio Simonetti: “Researching Testimonial Objects: The Postmemory of
the Allied Occupation of Italy through the Imperial War Museum’s
Collection”
Hannah Wilson: “The Materialisation of Sobibor Death Camp: Artefacts,
Narratives and Representation”
Laura Quercioli Mincer: “ARTEINMEMORIA: Presence and Oblivion of the
Shoah Among the Ruins of the Ancient Synagogue in Ostia”
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. 21. Beyond WWII - Other Postmemories
Room: T03
Chair: Igina Tattoni
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Rick Wallach: “Good Wars and Bad Wars along Cormac
McCarthy’s Southwest Borderlands”
Pilar Martinez Benedì: “Surface Trains, Underground (Post)Memories.
Cooperative Remembrance in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground
Railroad”
Bhavneet Kaur: “Metonymies of Memory: The Affective-Social Afterlife of
Postmemory in Downtown Srinagar”
Stefania De Lucia: “Teaching to Remember. Postmemory in Didactic Praxis”
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. 22. Romance e memoria nel tempo della "Pop Shoah"
Room: T04
Chair: Valerio Cordiner
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Alessandro Cinquegrani: “Enric Marco e gli altri: post-memoria e teoria del
romanzesco”
Francesca Pangallo: “Memoria anti-narrativa: Primo Levi o l’impossibilità
del romanzesco”
Federico Rigamonti: “Romanzesco e kitsch nelle Benevole di Jonathan
Littell”
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12.30-13.30: Closing Event​
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Muriel Hasbun (Independent Artist)
“Muriel Hasbun: Postmemory, Diaspora, and Trans-Cultural Mediation
Through Art
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