The Work of Memory and the Wounds of History with Angelika Bammer

Angelika Bammer will be giving a plenary talk as part of the conference, "Soul Wounds: Trauma and Healing across Generations," held at Stanford on 4-6 June. She is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

Angelika Bammer was trained in the theory and practice of textual analysis with an emphasis on narrative. After studying philology at the University of Heidelberg, she focused on modern literature and cultural production, including film, earning a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Emory University, she is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in The Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and a core faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Within the broad range of critical theories Professor Bammer brings to bear on her work, she is particularly grounded in feminist, Marxist, Freudian, and post-structuralist thought. Within the framework of both the long 19th and catastrophic 20th centuries, she explores the relationships between history, memory and forms of memorialization, and between the modalities of love and loss as represented in narrative and other expressive forms. She is interested in modes of academic production and the differential valuation of the processes and products of intellectual work.

Angelika Bammer has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Humanities Center and is the author of Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (Routledge, 1991), the editor of Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Indiana UP, 1994), and a special issue of and the producer of the Cultural Studies journal, New Formations on "The Question of `Home'" (1992). A multi-media installation of her work on Memory Sites: Destruction, Loss and Transformation was shown at both Emory University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003). Her current work includes a book on Difficult Pasts and the Work of Memory and a study of the trans-generational transmission of history in the form of a personal narrative (Born After). Her own practice as a scholar and writer has led her to investigate the creative possibilities of scholarly writing, resulting in an edited volume on How We Write: Scholarly Writing and the Power of Form.