HIST 405-02, Museums, Monuments and Memory, Spring 2010

Abstract

This course explores human society’s compulsion to create, visit, and reinterpret symbols of our past. Offering first a theoretical framework for the concept of collective memory, we then examine case studies from Memphis and around the world, with particular focus on East Asia, exploring such topics as the poetics and politics of exhibitions, ritualized memorialization, the nationalization of objects, cultural property controversies, and tourism and community. The curriculum integrates course readings and a field work practicum, with students choosing a local site for research and analysis. Vicarious visits to world-renowned sites for comparative purposes are made possible with media presentations, the internet, and computer-generated digital 3D models of national icons such as the Forbidden City in Beijing. Each student will submit an annotated bibliography of readings, a curator interview, an investigation of a collection object, a final essay that draws from course readings and their own field data, and present their findings to the class using appropriate visual aids. Through these exercises we approach the question of how and why humans generate and perpetuate collective memory.