Women Mobilizing Memory

Ayşe Gül Altınay (P.h.D, Duke University, Cultural Anthropology) is a Professor of Anthropology in Sabanci University in Turkey. She is the author of The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).Contreras María José :

María José Contreras is a Professor of Theater and performance artist at the Catholic University in Chile. She is a member of the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference.Hirsch Marianne :

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her publications include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia, 2012); Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (co-authored with Leo Spitzer) (California, 2010); and Rites of Return: Diaspora, Poetics and the Politics of Memory, co-edited with Nancy K. Miller (Columbia, 2011).Howard Jean :

Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where she teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She has written The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1993); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997); and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).Karaca Banu :

Banu Karaca (P.h.D, Graduate Center-CUNY) is a Visiting Scholar at Sabanci University. She has written articles in International Journal of Cultural Policy and New Perspectives on Turkey. She is the co-founder of “Black Ribbon”, a research platform that documents and analyzes censorship in the arts throughout Turkey.Solomon Alisa :

Alisa Solomon is a professor of Journalism at Columbia University. She has written Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan Books, 2013), Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) and other works.Ayşe Gül Altinay is professor of cultural anthropology and director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center at Sabancı University.

María José Contreras is a performance artist and associate professor at the Faculty of the Arts of the Universidad Católica de Chile.

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference.

Jean Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where she teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Banu Karaca is an assistant professor of anthropology and a Mercator-IPC Fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center. She is a cofounder of Siyah Bant, a platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey.

Alisa Solomon is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program.

Patrizia Violi, University of Bologna:
This is more than an extraordinary book—it is a fascinating journey around the world. It links the North and Global South through Europe, Chile, Turkey, and the United States in the name of innovative feminist practices able to rethink, reframe, and give new insight into memories of a traumatic past and difficult present. Showing the limitations of institutionalized forms of memorialization, this work truly opens up new paths for alternative forms of knowledge and political resistance.

Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley:
This volume confirms a shift of paradigm in the field of memory studies, linking it now to the mobilizing force of historical imagination. Without minimizing the devastating effects of violence and destruction, these authors demonstrate that the past is an archive of unlived possibilities and unpursued futures. Time shifts as one reads each of these pieces, grounded in an uncertain aftermath of dictatorship and war, or continuing colonization. They tell histories that release ways of imagining what could have been and even what should have been, experimenting with tense to open political pathways and affirmative politics from the sustained and discerning reflection on abysmal loss. Opposed to revisionism, these authors probe more deeply into the past than positivist histories have ever done, following the flash of possibility into the future. A brilliant, timely, and singular volume.