A workshop by Prof. Hirsch and Prof. Spitzer for Comparative Literature students
24 Apr 2026 - 12:00 / 24 Apr 2026 - 14:00
Photography and Memory in Liquid Time
a workshop by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
12 noon, Friday, April 24, 2026
Centre for Comparative Literature, Seminar room
Isabel Bader Theatre, 3rd floor, 93 Charles Street West Toronto
To register, please email Bao Nguyen
Reading materials: download here
Photographs serve as important media of memory crossing generational and geographical divides. They are both material remnants and haunting reminders that can bring a lost and distant past into the present. But how and what do photographs transmit? How do they live in time? In this workshop we propose to discuss theories and practices of photography that enable us to rethink the recursive temporalities of traumatic return that have shaped memory studies in recent decades.
We hope to build on the notion of “liquid time” that we developed in our recent book and exhibition on school photos and to explore memory’s multi-temporality, including the past’s own present and future.
Our discussion will be based on several precirculated readings and photo-based art projects. Participants will also be invited to bring an image that could add to our discussion of the liquid time of possibility and repair.
NYT Article about Canadian residential schools
Video of Hood Museum of Art 2020 exhibit on “School Photos and Their Afterlives”
curated by Hirsch and Spitzer
Toronto Star Éric Blais: Donald Trump and his war secretary are insulting the public, and creatives, by acting like they’re in a game https://share.google/Mgm5fGeeV0YHFJYeb
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.
Leo Spitzer is Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. He writes about responses to imperialism, Jewish refugee memory, and traumatic witnessing and its transmission. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies. His books include Lives in Between: Assimilation, Marginality, Exclusion in the Era of Emancipation (1989); Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (1998); and the co-edited volume Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (1998). He recently edited a doctor’s memoir from the Romanian Holocaust and is currently writing a family memoir about ethnic cleansing in a small Austrian town after the Anschluss.
Hirsch and Spitzer have co-authored two books: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020).
