Masterclass - Memory and Trauma: Migration and the Legacies of the Wars of the Twentieth Century
Masterclass: Memory and Trauma: Migration and the Legacies of the Wars of the Twentieth Century with Professor Joy Damousi (UMelb)
When: Thursday 25 May 2017
10:30am–12:00pm, with lunch to follow
Level 6 Forgan Smith Building (1), Seminar Room
For HaSS RhD students
RSVP by filling out the survey on this website by 20 May 2017
HaSS PhD and MPhil students are invited to participate in an IASH Masterclass with Professor Joy Damousi (UMelb) on the topic of Memory and Trauma: Migration and the Legacies of the Wars of the Twentieth Century.
The wars of the twentieth century resulted in the mass displacement and migration of over 70 million people throughout Europe.
How do immigrants fleeing from violence remember the experience of war? How do these memories of migrant communities shape cultural identity? The place of war memories at the state and commemorative level are well documented. But less discussed is how memories of war are discussed, forgotten and remembered at the familial and intimate level of migrant communities who have fled wars. For some families and individuals the need to forget and move forward is imperative to forge a new future. For others, memory of war is an essential part of family history, and so vital to retaining cultural and political ties with the past and cultural heritage.
In this Masterclass, issues of memory and war will be considered within refugee and immigrant families. A consideration of methodologies such as oral history and the use of family photographs in charting the enduring legacy of war and its cultural repercussions will also be explored.
Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on aspects of political history, women’s history and feminist history, memory and war, history of emotions and psychoanalysis, sound and war, and the history of post-war migration and refugees. She is the author of numerous books which include The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia; Gender and War: Australians At War in the Twentieth Century (with Marilyn Lake), and Diversity in Leadership: Australian Women, Past and Present (with Mary Tomsic and Kim Rubenstein). Her latest publication is Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War.
Readings (to be provided ahead of time):
The Introduction, and Chapters 7 and 8 of Damousi’s Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War (Cambridge, 2015).
Presented by the Intellectual and Literary History stream of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.