Northrop Frye Lecture: Marianne Hirsch, EM 001

23 Apr 2026 - 16:00 / 23 Apr 2026 - 18:00

The Centre for Comparative Literature is pleased to present a public lecture by
our Centre’s 2026 Northrop Frye Professor

Marianne Hirsch
Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature
and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
Columbia University

4:00 pm, Thursday, April 23, 2026
Emmanuel College, Room 001
75 Queen’s Park Crescent East, Toronto

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

 

Epiphanies of Repair: Memory Art and Practice

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.

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.

Hirsch  co-authored two books with Leo Spitezer: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020)

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.