CALL FOR PAPERS

Conference on Public Memory and Ethnicity

The York Center for Public Memory Studies will sponsor a conference on Public Memory and Ethnicity this October 26-28, 2007 at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. The conference will feature presentations by scholars in rhetorical studies, history, Jewish studies, communication studies, African American studies, and other disciplines.

We are happy to announce the following featured speakers:

     * *Erna Paris*, author of several books including the award winning

       /Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History/

     * *Stephen H. Browne*, eminent scholar of rhetoric and public memory

     * *Mark McPhail*, author of several books on African American

       history and racial discourse

     * *Dexter Gordon*, prolific scholar and director of African American

       Studies at the University of Puget Sound

Scholars who wish to be included in the concurrent sessions are invited to submit abstracts by August 1, 2007.  Those selected for presentation will be notified by August 15^th . Applications for presentation, including a one-page, single-spaced abstract, should be sent to G.

Mitchell Reyes at [log in to unmask] The conference will be held on the campus of Lewis and Clark College.

The study of public memory and ethnicity is increasingly an inter-disciplinary phenomenon. This conference seeks to capitalize on that interdisciplinarity, bringing scholars together from various fields to share and test ideas regarding the connections between public memory and ethnicity. At minimum, public memory assumes that memory is not only an individual phenomenon, it is also a collective and public one.

Individuals do not simply remember individually, they get remembered in strategic and stylized ways. These practices of remembrance serve several important social and ontological functions: they mark what is and what is not worthy of memory; they reveal cultural values; they instruct and order our social world; and, taken together, they tell a narrative out of which a sense of collective identity emerges. This conference seeks to connect with and extend our understanding of public memory by considering its relationship with race and ethnicity. How does public memory carve up race and ethnicity? How do race and ethnicity constrain public memory? These questions only begin a long list of interesting problems found at the nexus of public memory and ethnicity.

The conference will explore these issues and related problems regarding the influence of remembrance on the order of things.

The conference is organized in connection with the conference series on public memory developed at Syracuse University, and will lead to publication of a university press book to be edited by the conference organizer. All papers presented will be eligible for consideration for publication.

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"The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some 'solution', it is on the hither side of all solutions."

                                                                               --Merleau-Ponty