Epiphanies of Repair: Memory Art and Practice

Title: 'Epiphanies of Repair: Memory Art and Practice'

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2026

Time: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Doors will open at 3:45 PM)

Location: University of Toronto - Emmanuel College, 75 Queen's Park Cresent East, Toronto

Room #: EM 001

Abstract:

How can we imagine repair at this moment of continuing war and genocide, of violence, political neglect and injustice? This talk will place psychoanalytic theories of reparation into conversation with works by contemporary memorial artists like Kara Walker and Doris Salcedo. With destruction as a necessary ground of repair, their works dislodge entrenched embodied responses to traumatic remembrance, thus re-imagining the past and remembering its unrealized possibilities. Memory art, Hirsch will suggest, can become a transformative practice of communal repair and a platform of social solidarity.

About the Speaker:

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. She is a former President of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012) and the co-edited volumes Women Mobilizing Memory (2019) and Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (2020). Currently a fellow at the Getty Research Institute she is working on a book about the reparative potentials of memory.

The Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory is selected annually, to bring innovative comparative scholars to deliver one or two public lectures to the University of Toronto community, offer workshops and seminars at the Centre for Comparative Literature, and meet with faculty and students.

We would appreciate it if you could RSVP for the public lecture on Eventbrite.

For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email the Centre for Comparative Literature ([email protected]).

We look forward to welcoming you at our event!

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Host or Publisher Centre for Comparative Literature