Towards Relational Memory

The aim of this microseminar is to engage with the work of Michael Rothberg (University of California, Los Angeles), who will deliver the Katz Distinguished Lecture in Fall 2025.  Rothberg is a pathbreaking scholar whose work spans Holocaust studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature and media studies. A prolific public scholar, Rothberg was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his ongoing study of what he calls “comparison controversies,” public debates about the ethics of making analogies between different histories of political violence. In this microseminar we will read selections from his second book, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2012) and his third book, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019). We will also discuss some of his recent interventions into contemporary debates about the politics of memory, as well as his current co-authored work in progress, which explores the effects of transnational migration on cultural memory and demonstrates the ways immigrants develop stakes in the histories of their adopted societies. Rothberg is co-organizer of the Working Group in Memory Studies at UCLA, and both this microseminar and Rothberg’s visit will help to launch the new UW cross-disciplinary research cluster in relational memory studies, co-organized by Liora Halperin and Jason Groves. All readings are in English.

Late Add Period:
Please register for this course as soon as possible to avoid late registration fees. For Fall Quarter 2025: a $20 change of registration fee will be charged for all registration changes made on a single day starting September 24, and starting on October 8, that fee increases to $75.