HIST 30157 - Seminar: War & Memory in Contemporary Europe

Course Credit: 1
SEMINAR: WAR & MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE This seminar explores the ways Europeans have remembered (and forgotten) the traumas of the twentieth century: war, genocide, dictatorship, and ethnic cleansing. We will draw upon historical works, oral histories, memoirs, films, and novels to understand the struggle over the meaning of these events. The course is organized around a series of conflicts and their retellings: the First World War, the Holodomor (the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine), the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, the Francoist Dictatorship in Spain, and the Yugoslav Wars. We will center on themes of collective trauma, individual versus national memories, the role of amnesia and fantasy in collective memory, the ongoing reckoning with colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism in Europe, and the politics of the past. [HSS]