Wednesday, September 14, 2016 at 4:00pm
Discussions on “Traumatic Futures”
Marita Sturken -- New York University
“Cultural Memories of the Future”
This talk examines how the different modes of memorialization produce particular temporalities and concepts of the future. Sturken will discuss how the last few decades have witnessed an embrace of cultural memory as a social force throughout the world, with a “memory boom” emerging in the wake of 20th century histories of violence.
E. Ann Kaplan -- Stony Brook University
“Preppers, Fathers and Virtual Future Humans: Popular Culture Envisions the Future Today”
This talk addresses pervasive dystopian fantasies as a symptom of our living in an era of grave global uncertainty about the future. While dangers are real, Kaplan will discuss both the exploitation of fear by those in power and the political denial of scientific data when truth is economically inconvenient.
Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero.
Ann Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, where she also founded and directed The Humanities Institute for years. She is Past President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Kaplan has written many books and articles on topics in cultural studies, media, women's studies, and for the last five years, Environmental Humanities. Her most recent book is Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction.