Tue November 19, 2019
4-6pm
This talk will discuss the strange translation and reception history of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was selected— with some, but not necessarily the assumed, justification— in the 1980s as a “founding father” of contemporary memory studies. Halbwachs’s work on memory was in fact not his most systematic, nor was it aimed in any way to found a new field. Indeed, many contemporary references to it are more totemic than substantive, and key pieces of his oevre have not in fact been available, or available in straightforward ways, at least in the English-language discourse. The talk will also speculate on the possible effects new English translations might have on the course of the field.
Watch the video recording here.
