In this talk, Sauzade will chronicle the history 9/11 memorials around Long Island, focusing on how their shared formal characteristics and reoccurring visual and symbolic elements present a collective memory of the attacks that challenges the representation of psychological trauma presented by New York City’s national memorial, “Reflecting Absence.” 

Alena Sauzade was a 2014–15 HISB public humanities fellow. She is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University specializing in public art and commemoration. Her dissertation, Witnesses to Terror: Nationhood and Trauma in Memorials to Victims of Terrorism, focuses on memorials to victims of the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States and abroad.