Results by title

In the wake of unthinkable atrocities, it is reasonable to ask how any population can move on from the experience of genocide. Simply remembering the past can, in the shadow of mass death, be retraumatizing. So how can such momentous events be memorialized in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? Genocide memorials tell a story about the past, preserve evidence of the violence that occurred, and provide emotional support to survivors. But the goal of amplifying survivors’ voices can fade amid larger narratives entrenched in political motivations.

In After Genocide,Nicole Fox investigates the ways memorials can shape the experiences of survivors decades after mass violence has ended. She examines how memorializations can both heal and hurt, especially when they fail to represent all genders, ethnicities, and classes of those afflicted. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandans, Fox reveals their relationships to these spaces and uncovers those voices silenced by the dominant narrative—arguing that the erasure of such stories is an act of violence itself. The book probes the ongoing question of how to fit survivors in to the dominant narrative of healing and importantly demonstrates how memorials can shape possibilities for growth, national cohesion, reconciliation, and hope for the future.

Musicologist Georgia J. Cowart explores how Antoine Watteau’s late paintings reimagine the symbolic order of absolutism in the wake of Louis XIV’s death.

Antoine Watteau has long been known for the theatricality of his paintings, but what that theatricality signifies has remained elusive. In After the King, Georgia Cowart contends that this mode of painting takes shape in response to the spectacle of Louis XIV’s absolutism, which the painter’s late works transform into a new aesthetic language.

The king’s death marked a turning point in Watteau’s art. In the six years that followed, his paintings turned more decisively toward the musical stage. Evoking theatrical plots, frontispieces, and costume types, they conjured a world in which the legacy of absolutist culture lingered as stylized memory—its rituals, emblems, and pleasures recast through theatrical illusion and ironic distance.

Rather than treating Watteau as a painter of nostalgic reverie or Rococo charm, Cowart situates his art within the immersive performance culture of Versailles and the vibrant Parisian stage, at a time when the opéra-ballet, popular opera, and the commedia dell’arte were charting new theatrical landscapes. Drawing on art history, musicology, theater studies, and Pierre Nora’s theory of lieux de mémoire, she proposes a new framework that understands Watteau’s paintings as acts of theatrical memory and cultural recomposition. 

Elegantly written and conceptually ambitious, After the King reveals how Watteau recoded the symbols of monarchy to stage a post-absolutist cultural imagination shaped by irony, sensuality, and poetic transformation. 

A poignant photographic tour of honor, sacrifice, and memory within America's national cemeteries

In America’s National Cemeteries, Timothy B. Spears takes the reader on a grand tour of these singular places of commemoration, the final resting place for more than four million American military personnel who died either in wartime, during their time of service, or after their honorable discharge. His absorbing account—part historical narrative and part travelogue—is enhanced by 180 of his remarkable photographs, which capture the spirit, beauty, and solemn remembrance to be found in each of the 156 national cemeteries across America.

Spears details the history of the cemeteries since their establishment during the American Civil War and explores their ongoing evolution and importance to American society and the commitment America has made to honoring its military dead. With headstones neatly arrayed in rows and each soldier typically buried in an identical fashion, the cemeteries symbolize an enduring connection between human mortality and national identity. They also reflect the nation’s persistent challenges with inequalities and injustice, violence and racism, lingering questions about “good” versus “bad” wars, and the vexed legacies of America’s military forays.

In this unique meditation on American history, memory, and place, Spears embraces the impact of the past on the present, offering an original perspective on the meaning of military service, mortality, and remembrance and how these national cemeteries have evolved into truly iconic and emblematic American spaces. The book also features a foreword by Roderick Gainer, Chief Curator of Arlington National Cemetery since 2013.

Understanding the systems that shape what societies remember, archive, and forget.

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age, Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.

This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century.

The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also remembered and commemorated by poets and fiction writers who understood that the war had bequeathed both historical and symbolic meanings to American culture. Although the defeated Confederacy became best known for producing a literature of nostalgia and an ideological defensiveness intended to protect the South's own version of history, authors loyal to the Union also confronted the question of what the memory of the war signified, and how to shape the literary response to that individual and collective experience.

In Ashes of the Mind, Martin Griffin examines the work of five Northerners—three poets and two fiction writers—who over a period of four decades tried to understand and articulate the landscape of memory in postwar America, and in particular in that part of the nation that could, with most justification, claim the victory of its beliefs and values. The book begins with an examination of the rhetorical grandeur of James Russell Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode, ranges across Herman Melville's ironic war poetry, Henry James's novel of North-South reconciliation, The Bostonians, and Ambrose Bierce's short stories, and ends with the bitter meditation on race and nation presented by Paul Laurence Dunbar's elegy “Robert Gould Shaw.” Together these texts reveal how a group of representative Northern writers were haunted in different ways by the memory of the 
conflict and its fraught legacy.

Griffin traces a concern with individual and community loss, ambivalence toward victory, and a changing politics of commemoration in the writings of Lowell, Melville, James, Bierce, and Dunbar. What links these very different authors is a Northern memory of the war that became more complex and more compromised as the century went on, often replacing a sense of justification and achievement with a perception of irony and failed promise.