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Fall 2005 Faculty Fellows

Fall Seminar: Remembering and Forgetting; Collecting and Discarding

Marc Bizer, Associate Professor of French, is a scholar of early modern France and the European Renaissance. He brings to the seminar current work on the remembrance of Homer and Europe's classical heritage by French humanist scholars and their adaptation and application of this heritage to contemporary political forms and events, from the establishment of absolute monarchy to the eventual growth of a civil society.

Kate Catterall, Associate Professor of Design, studies memorial design, memory in urban and domestic design and artifacts, and designed obsolescence and product recycling. Her current project focuses on artifacts and acts of remembrance in the aftermath of a national defeat or non-heroic historical episode and seeks, in particular, to develop working guidelines for the design of one or a series of memorial devices in Northern Ireland.

David Crew, Professor of History, works on twentieth century Germany. He specializes in the history and politics of memory since 1945. He brings to the seminar two current projects, one on visual (especially photographic), written, and oral depictions of the bombing of German cities during World War Two, and another on the ways in which German successor states, from 1918 to 1989, discarded, transformed, or recycled the symbols of the political and social regimes they replaced.

Diane Davis, Assistant Professor in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition, works in rhetorical theory, philosophy, and media and communication studies. She brings to the seminar a particular interest in the problem of the belatedness of the event (the impossibility of having an "originary experience"), in the consequent rhetorical imperative to produce an interiorizable, "memorable," "past," and in the various technologies of inscription that make such production possible.

Louise Harpman holds the Harwell Hamilton Harris Professorship in Architecture and is the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs at the University of Texas School of Architecture. She is a principal of Specht Harpman, an award-winning architectural firm with offices in New York City and Austin that she co-founded in 1995. An avid collector of objects, which often become points of departure for her (and her firm's) creative work, Professor Harpman's current project includes research into other architects--including Sir John Soane, Charles and Ray Eames, Paul Rudolph, and Charles Moore--who share a love of objects, and, more importantly, consider the display of objects essential to their creative work and their teaching.

Jeffrey Meikle, Professor of American Studies and Art History, is a scholar of 20th century American popular and mass culture and industrial design. His work has often explored the use of traditional styles to domesticate the unprecedented forms of modernity and the validation of unprecedented new materials, such as plastic, by their imitation of traditional materials to appeal to the past. He brings to the seminar a new project entitled "A Paper Atlantis: Postcards, Mass Art, and the American Scene," which analyzes representations of America in a popular genre of colorized picture postcard produced between the 1930s and the 1950s.

Janet Staiger, William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Communication, teaches in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and is a scholar of film and television production and reception. The recent work that she will bring to the seminar focuses on fans and fan behavior, including "systematic," "fetish," and "souvenir" collecting and collections of cinema star materials.

Pauline Strong, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies, is a cultural anthropologist with research specialties in the representation of Native Americans in U. S. popular culture, commemoration and historical reenactment in the U. S., and critical museum studies. She brings to the seminar current projects on the scholarly, popular, and artistic impact of the Quincentenary commemorations of Columbus's first voyage to the Americas, on the appropriation of Native American rituals and symbols in U. S. youth organizations, and on self-representation of indigenous identity in tribal museums and the new National Museum of the American Indian.

Helena Woodard, Associate Professor of English, studies African-British and African-American writing, memory, and culture. She brings to the seminar a current project on slavery museums, artifacts, and heritage sites that explores the international cultural tourism industry's production of sites of trauma, memory, and "slave recovery."

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