Calendar Event

February 12, 2010, 9:00 am to 12:00 pm

Humanities Center Mini-Seminar - Gabriele Schwab

Each semester the SU Humanities Center Mini-Seminar features distinguished visiting scholars who present their work in a more intensive, conversational, and seminar-style format. Enrollment is limited and materials are sent to participating faculty and students ahead of time in order to inform the discussion with the seminar leader. Fall 2009 Humanities Mini-Seminars featured W.J.T Mitchell (University of Chicago) and Richard Dyer (Kings College, U.K.).

This spring’s Humanities Mini-Seminar program will bring to campus Professor Gabriele Schwab (Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Associate Faculty in Anthropology and Womens Studies at the University of California, Irvine) and Professor Gerhard Richter (Professor of German, University of Santa Barbara).

Professor Schwab’s Mini-Seminar will be held on Friday, February 12th, from 9 am-noon. She will be presenting a discussion of her newest book on Haunting Legacies, which explores how victims and perpetrators pass on the ineradicable legacies of violent histories across the generations. Professor Schwab analyzes narratives of the descendants of holocaust survivors and perpetrators in postwar generation in Germany in the context of earlier histories of colonialism and slavery as well as more recent violent histories of apartheid in South Africa, disappearances under South-American dictatorships, and new practices of torture after September 11, 2001. The work also raises important questions of transgenerational responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness in the context of networks of interlaced memories across the boundaries of victims and perpetrators, and concludes with a reflection on child soldiers and the increasing global violence against children.

Professor Schwab is author of several highly praised critical works that interweave recent psychoanalytic theory, literary interpretation, Native American literature and 20th Century Comparative Literature. Her works include Subjects Without Selves (Harvard, 1994), The Mirror and the Killer Queen: Otherness and Literary Language (Indiana, 1996), and co-editor of Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (Columbia, 2007).

If you would like to enroll in Professor Schwab's Mini-Seminar on Friday morning, February 12th, please contact Kathryn Tunkel in the Humanities Center. Space is limited to 40 participating faculty and students.