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Biography
My teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of Philosophy, Sociology and Politics. I have written three monographs. In the first, "Ambiguous Memory: the Nazi Past and German National Identity, "(Praeger 2001) I argued that German memory followed two trajectories: a universalization of the past in the East and an internalization of the past in the West. The book focused on a comparative study of how the Nazi past and the Holocaust were remembered in official speeches and memorials in the two Germany’s during the 1980s and in unified Germany in the early 1990s.
My second monograph, "Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe: The Persistence of the Past" was published with Ashgate Publishers (2012). This book draws on the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Zygmunt Bauman to discuss examples from the multiple layers of Europe’s totalitarian past. It asks why certain places and not others symbolically capture the past and freeze time? What kind of shadows, traces, ciphers, remnants and ruins does the past leave on the present society? Why does the process of memory, as a fluid and changing activity, seem to prevent its own solidification?
"Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time" examines different encounters with the past from within the present-whether as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof. Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt's definition of the present as a time span lying between past and future, the book reflects on the old philosophical question of how to live the good life-not only with others who are physically with us but also with those whose presence is ghostly and liminal. While tradition may no longer command the same authority as it did in antiquity or the middle ages, individuals are by no means severed from the past. Rather, nostalgic longing for bygone times and traumatic preoccupation with painful historical events demonstrate the vitality of the past within the present. Chapters examine ways in which the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust and communism have been remembered after 1945 and 1989. Maintaining a sustained reflection on the nexus of memory, modernity and time in tandem with ancient questions of responsibility for one another and the world, the volume contributes to the growing field of memory studies from a philosophical perspective.
In addition, I edited "The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies" (2015) which among others, includes chapters by Patrick Hutton, Daniel Levy, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Mieke Bal, Alexander Etkind and an afterword by Jeffrey Olick.
Articles, chapters and book reviews have appeared in Memory Studies, New German Critique, The European Legacy, Journal of Political Power, European Journal of Social Theory, Constellations: a Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory and the Journal of Baltic Studies.
I am currently working on a manuscript on the centrality of the world for Hannah Arendt's political philosophy.
Activities
Employment (1)
Works (41)
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