Colloquium conjures up ghosts of the past

By Alex Burkett

Memory works in unseen ways, according to participants in a graduate colloquium April 19­20. And the ways in which we use memory, they said, affect our own construction of history.

Nearly 40 scholars presented papers at "Limits of the Past: The Human Sciences and the Turn to Memory," a graduate student colloquium at the Wyatt Center organized by Vanderbilt history Ph.D. candidates Edward Harcourt and David Karr.

The conference brought together some 38 presenters from 28 research universities from as far as Sweden and Barbados. The purpose, Harcourt said, was to grapple with the turn to memory and its bearing on modern intellectual and historical study.

"Our culture today is sort of dripping in nostalgia," Harcourt said. "The turn of the millennium has got people thinking about the past and the meaning of the 20th century."

With that thematic approach, Harcourt and his colleagues set out to design a venue in which graduate scholars could explore and understand the study of memory.

"A number of things have converged [in the field of memory studies]," he said. "In the field of history, we've started to look at things like nationalism and how a national community is created and sustained, the myths that people tell themselves about their cultures."

That thematic idea, he said, precipitated the weekend-long event, which featured 14 such discussions that varied among a range of topics that spanned some 20 disciplines. They included discussions of a town in Nazi Germany with Viking archaeological remains claimed by the Danish, the role of memory in postcolonial Mali and the historical record of lynching in the American South.

"We really subsumed people's disciplinary identities," Harcourt said. "We didn't identify people by disciplines; panels had a mix of anthropologists and historical scholars."

That blurring of the lines across intellectual disciplines is what made the conference useful, according to Eleanor Bright Fleming, a graduate student in political science at Vanderbilt, who participated in the conference.

"[The conference] brought together a collection of scholars who were not only interdisciplinary, but who did a lot of different work," she said. "It was a great mix of scholars talking about a very rich and diverse body of work."

Fleming's paper evaluated the use of memory in reconstructing the civil rights movement; she interviewed 30 residents of Tennessee, she said, and found that collective memory is important to understanding historical events.

The result is an interest in the importance of memory studies among the modern intelligentsia.

"It's something that is basically taking a common-sense approach to how we think about the past," she said.

In Fleming's case, the challenge was to bridge the factual gap between recorded notions of history and what people remember.

"You're asking people about the past," she said, "delving into the past to find out what's going on, instead of reading the glossing-over of history in books."

Harcourt and a committee of graduate students from seven programs at Vanderbilt received some 83 submissions that flooded Vanderbilt's Prometheus server after the committee issued a call for papers. After reviewing the submissions, the committee selected 38 students to present their papers.

"[The colloquium] brought together young scholars from all over the world, people from many different disciplines," said Mona Frederick, executive director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, which provided financial backing for the event, and whose interdisciplinary research theme this year coincides with the colloquium's exploration of memory.

"People don't often interact across disciplines," she said.

"There were two things we were really trying to achieve with this," Harcourt said. "We wanted to establish a forum each year where our graduate students can organize this kind of conference, and enjoy a link with the Robert Penn Warren Center [for the Humanities].

"The other goal we had was to advertise Vanderbilt as a venue for graduate work and graduate discussion. And I think we've achieved that as well."

Meanwhile, administrators said the colloquium may have lasting results on Vanderbilt's intellectual community.