Literature and Terror
– Lynda Hall (English)
My work looks at traumatic memory from a literary
perspective. My research and teaching
lately has been exploring the ways that traumatic memory, especially that
memory that comes from terror, is reflected and filtered through literature,
particularly fiction. I have focused on
American slavery, the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the Argentinian Dirty
War, and the recent fiction that has been “inspired” by the events of 9/11/01.
Some of this work includes the writings of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Cathy
Caruth, and Shoshana Felman. My interest
in this comes from an overlap in my research on the rise of the English Gothic
novel of the 1790s as a response to the English unease with the French
Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
Because of the overwhelming use of the word “terrorism” in the past
decade, some of the recent fiction inspired by 9/11 is also fascinating. I am
currently planning a small international symposium for April 4 commemorating
the creative works of Alicia Kozameh, a former political prisoner in the 1970s
and 1980s “Dirty War” in Argentina.
Intergenerational
transmission of genocide histories – Angeliki Kanavou (Political Science) and
Shari Kuchenbecker (Psychology)
This project compares adult children of survivors and Khmer
Rouge (KR) cadres who were involved directly or indirectly in the genocide by
the KR in Cambodia (1975-79). The main objective is to examine to what extent
there are differences in the way willing and unwilling KR agents and survivor
children have constructed their memories about the traumatic past and relate to
others in society and in their communities in order to release socio-political
obstacles created by the genocide to build a more stable and productive country
in the future. The project survey helps address the following issues: a) How
does former type of parent identity (KR cadre; survivor; obedient observer)
affect transmission and reconstruction of memory of the child and in turn
impact the type of integration of the child today especially with regard to
community building and empathizing with others? And, how do different types of
parent traumas then manifest in how different groups’ children relate to
society today and are capable of empathy? Specifically, we are interested to
see which groups’ young adult children identify the strongest with community,
how they think about past events and ongoing efforts at justice, manifest trust
and empathy.
Linguistic
Resistance, Identity and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights – Pilar Valenzuela (Languages)
Kawapanan is an Amazonian linguistic family composed of only two
languages, Shiwilu and Shawi. Since 2007 my research has focused on the
description and documentation of these languages, especially Shiwilu, which
currently has only some 30 fluent speakers. In addition to publishing a book
and a few articles in professional venues, I have developed resources to aid in
language revitalization and preservation efforts, such as a practical
orthography accompanied by a guide for local teachers and language activists, a
trilingual Shiwilu-English-Spanish dictionary with over 6,000 entries, and a collection
of stories in Shiwilu and Spanish.
To a significant degree, Amazonian peoples define their identity
in terms of an indigenous language. It is expected that ethno-linguistic
documentation will help them strengthen their ethnic identity and pride, which
may in turn have an impact on their status and rights as indigenous peoples
(e.g. the use of their ethnic language in the school). Materials produced
by the project have been deposited at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages
of Latin America (AILLA), hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.
WikiLoot - Justin St.
P. Walsh (Art) and Michael Bazyler (Law), in collaboration with Jason Felch (Los Angeles Times) and scholars at other
universities
For decades, archaeological sites around the world have been
ravaged by looters searching for artifacts that can be sold to museums and
collectors. These looters are encouraged by the high prices their finds will
generate – sometimes into the millions of dollars. Governments in source
countries have fought for some time to try to stem this trade in cultural
heritage. Italy, for example, has indicted two art dealers for smuggling, and
confiscated their archives. The WikiLoot project seeks to create an online
database of information about looted art, including entries on specific pieces and
on people and institutions involved in the trade of illicit heritage. It will
include a crowdsourcing component that will allow the general public to assist
with the identification of artworks in the smugglers’archives and the
transcription/translation of documents. The data generated in this way will be
made available to scholars to aid in plotting networks of trade and discovering
patterns of illegal behavior.
