Public Amnesias and Their Discontents:Theories and Practices of Remembering

This course considers the consequences of forgetting as one of the challenges and provocations to the work of public humanities. By extending the histories of memory into discourses of “amnesia,” we will identify origins, effects, and the possibility of a return for material that has become forgotten or, more significant for us, made forgettable. This class is not about memory loss as an individual neurological condition, but as cultural and civic phenomena: specifically, how material objects in the public sphere become lost from view.