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“Memory and Culture” explores issues including social memory, representation, the construction of knowledge and rhetorical space, and how museums grapple with controversial and traumatic events. We will study the practice of museology as it relates to public humanities, with attention paid to issues of representation, the construction of knowledge, and the constitution of new rhetorical spaces.  Students will also gain hands-on skills by contributing to the conference.  The program will culminate with a speaker series on topics such as the role of museums, historical controversies, the experiences of subaltern groups, and building collaborative relationships.   Case studies might include the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Eiteljorg Museum, and the Gettysburg American Civil War Museum.  To take advantage of new technologies and reach a broader audience, we will explore the possibility of launching a simultaneous Webcast of the conference.  In addition, we anticipate that a co-edited volume published with a major university press will serve as the major scholarly outcome of this project.

Distinguished Lectures

A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Steven L. Tuck
Associate Professor Department of Classics

Memory, Poetry, and Imperial Ideology in Roman Domestic Space

October 10, 2010 5:00 PM
Bachelor Hall 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Ann Elizabeth Armstrong
Associate Professor Department of Theatre and the Western College Program

Embodying the Witness and Whiteness: Remembering Freedom Summer 1964 in Drama

October 18, 2010 4:00 PM
Bachelor Hall 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Helen Sheumaker
Visiting Associate Professor American Studies Program

Desire, Possession, Memories: Antique Collecting Naratives of A.V.L. Carrick (1875-1961)

November 15, 2010 4:00 PM
Bachelor 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Diane Fellows
Associate Professor Department of Architecture and Interior Design

TopoNarratives 5 + 6: Films in Progress

November 15, 2010 5:00 PM
Bachelor 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Tammy Lynn Brown
Assistant Professor, Black World Studies Program and Department of History

"I fight among fighters for a New World": Pearl Primus, U.S. Democracy and the Power of Dance

December 7, 2010 4:00 PM
Bachelor 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Stephen M. Norris
Associate Professor, Department of History, Film Studies Program, and the Havighurst Center for Russian & Post-Soviet Studies

Memory for Sale: Victory Day 2010 and the Marketing of Patriotism

December 7, 2010 5:00 PM
Bachelor 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Emily Zakin
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy

Freud's Rome: The Eternal City and the Insistent Past

January 24, 2011 4:00 PM
Bachelor 337
A painting of various women on the left dancing and playing instruments and on the right a man sits alone looking sad
Madelyn M. Detloff
Associate Professor, Department of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Letter from Our Conscience: The New Yorker Writers on Ethics in World Crises

January 24, 2011 5:00 PM
Bachelor 337

2009-11 Altman Scholars

Steve Tuck

Steve Tuck is a professor of Classics here at Miami University. He is author of A History of Roman Art. Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 2015Latin Inscriptions in the Kelsey Museum: The Dennison & De Criscio Collections. University of Michigan Press , 2006. His current projects include AD 79: The Eruption of Vesuvius and the Legacy of Pompeii. Under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press, due Feb. 2016 and Oxford Handbook of Pompeii (editor), due Jan. 2017.

Ann Elizabeth Armstrong

Ann Elizabeth Armstrong holds both an M.F.A. in directing and a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She is co-director of the “Finding Freedom Summer Project,” an initiative that is nurturing various interdisciplinary humanities projects surrounding the history of the civil rights movement. She created a walking tour of Western College campus that explores the events that occurred on this site while activists trained for Freedom Summer in 1964. For this work, she has received grants from the Ohio Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Armstrong’s scholarship includes publications on feminist pedagogy, community-based theatre, theatre of the oppressed, and intercultural theatre. She is an affiliate in Women’s Studies and American Studies, and she also teaches in the Western College Program. At Miami, she teaches directing, dramatic literature and community-based theatre, and directs in the production season.

Madelyn Detloff

Madelyn Detloff is Professor and Chair of English and Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies. She is the author of The Value of Virginia Woolf (Cambridge, 2016) and The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2009) and co-editor (with Brenda Helt) of Queer Bloomsbury (Edinburgh, 2016) and (with Diana Royer) of Virginia Woolf: Art, Education, and Internationalism (Clemson, 2008). She has published essays in journals including Hypatia, Women’s Studies, ELN, Literature Compass, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Modernism/modernity. She is currently writing a book provisionally titled "Lessons from the Belly of the Beast: Negotiating Ambivalence in the Neoliberal Leviathan."


Emily Zakin

Emily Zakin studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Her current research focuses on the limits and possibilities of political community. The author of numerous book chapters and articles, she was also a co-founder of the journal PhiloSOPHIA and is the co-editor of Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (Routledge, 1997) and Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis (SUNY, 2009). 


Diane Fellows

Diane Fellows is Associate Professor of Architecture and Interior Design. Her work in drawing, painting, photography, and digital film explores the long-term effects of displacement on individuals and communities and the creation of personal and cultural meaning in unfamiliar landscapes. Her recent architecture design studios have helped create needed structures for the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, in collaboration with camp residents and non-governmental organizations. Her work has been exhibited in Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. Her recent essay on forced migration will appear in Structures of Protection? Rethinking Refugee Shelter (Berghahn, 2020).

Tammy L. Brown

Tammy L. Brown is an interdisciplinary scholar, creative writer, and visual artist. Her research, writing, and art range from historical studies to abstract paintings and multimedia poetry. Her book, City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York (2015), tells the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals to reveal the history of immigration to New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. She is currently working on a biography of rock ’n’ roll virtuoso Jimi Hendrix.

2009-11 Altman Fellows

Steve Norris

Steve Norris, professor of History, research interests include Russian history, Nationalism, visual history, as well as film and history. He is author of Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism (Indiana University Press, 2012) and A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006). His current project includes his work with images, nationhood, and propaganda in Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries. The project is entitled Communism's Cartoonist: Boris Efimov and the Soviet Century.  Boris Efimov (1900-2008) was the most significant political caricaturist in Soviet history.  He addresses Eflmov's career beginnings in Civil War Ukraine when he was just a teenager before he moved to Moscow in 1922 and worked as a cartoonist for major Soviet publications such as Izvestiia and Krokodil.  Norris then addresses Eflmov's continuation in drawing caricatures for them until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.  This Efimov involves an exhibition of his works, an album containing examples of his cartoons, and a biography of his life and work.

Helen Sheumaker

Helen Sheumaker is a senior lecturer with joint appointment in the History and Global and Intercultural Studies programs here at Miami University. Her research interests include material culture methods and theory, public history, and United States nineteenth cultural history. She is author of Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hair Work, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, editor of Memory Matters: Proceedings from the 2010 Conference Hosted by the Humanities Center, Miami University of Ohio, SUNY Press, 2011. Her current project is entitled Artifacts from Modern America: Daily Life of Twentieth-century Americans Illustrated, and is under contract with ABC-CLIO and Greenwood Press imprint, projected publication date October 2018.