Dora Apel

 October 5, 2022.

Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, returns to the program to talk about her book Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.

"In Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, Dora Apel goes on the offensive against the myriad myths and delusions peddled about the Motor City; not only that, she rebuffs the blame and shame that have traditionally been directed at the Detroit citizenry, and redirects our attention to the corporations and bureaucrats who have abandoned it. The result is a work that seems to invigorate a depressed debate and ask timely questions about social values in America and the world it influences." ― Los Angeles Review of Books

"In the early twentieth century, Detroit was defined by Charles Sheeler's photos of the River Rouge plant and Diego Rivera's murals of work. Today, the hulking ruins of old industrial buildings and empty skyscrapers symbolize the city. In this provocative analysis, informed by urban geography, political economy, and art history, Dora Apel reflects on what images of ruined Detroit teach us about the city,  popular culture, and American capitalism." -- Thomas J. Sugrue ― The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

 

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Katherine Hite

April 13, 2022.

Katherine Hite, Professor of Political Science on the Fredrick Ferris Thompson Chair and Director of Research and Development at Vassar College, talks about her recent research on Texas history, published in her articles "Texas, Monuments, and the Politics of Self-Reckoning in Texas," (Memory Studies Special Issue 14:6, 2021) and "A Monumental Battle for the Story of Texas," (Revista: The Harvard Journal of Latin Amerian Studies, 20:23, 2021), as well as about her books on monuments and the politics of memory in Latin America and Spain: The Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (Routledge, 2013) and Memory in Chile from Pinochet to Bachelet (First Forum, 2013). 

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Dora Apel

Vienna: Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Rachel Whiteread, 2000

October 13, 2021.

The acclaimed art historian and cultural critic, Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, talks about her recent monograph, Calling Memory Into Place (Rutgers UP, 2020). Her many books include Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob;  Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing; and Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline.

"In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.  
 

"These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations."  

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Herman Eberhardt

Ayako Matsushita on her graduation day from Heart Mountain High School. Before the war she attended Marshall High School in Los Angeles.

Frank Hirahara 1944

October 25, 2017.

Herman Eberhardt, Supervisory Curator at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, discusses the Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, and his exhibition: Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II, on view in the Library's William J. vanden Heuvel Gallery through December 31, 2017.

Eileen Leonard

April 13, 2016:

Eileen Leonard, Professor of Sociology at Vassar College, talks about her book Crime, Inequality, and Power published in 2015 by Routledge.

‘In Crime, Inequality and Power, Leonard offers a powerful critique of our current system of justice and the underlying socially constructed biases that continue to focus upon specific types of criminal behavior, while minimizing others. Central to her thesis is that "…power and persistent inequality in America has more to do with our understanding of crime and our punishment of it, rather than the harm that behavior inflicts". Crime, Inequality and Power is an important addition to the discipline of criminology and an essential read for students, policymakers and scholars interested in this complex topic.’

 -- David Polizzi, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Indiana State University, 

38:47 minutes.

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