Taubman College Herscher Teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Lectures at MaMa in Zagreb
In December, Associate Professor Andrew Herscher taught a mini-seminar in the Global Humanities Program at the Tsinghua Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The seminar, entitled “Space, Memory, Politics,” explored the spatialization of public memory, focusing on monuments, heritage, and ruins in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. The seminar was the third in a series of international humanities seminars that have been hosted by the Tsinghua Institute for World Literatures and Cultures and dedicated to advancing cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-language research in the humanities. Visit the Tsinghua University website for more information.
Also in December, Herscher participated in the fourth seminar of the series “Unexpected Encounters,” organized by the Institute for Duration, Location, and Variables at the Multimedia Institute MaMa in Zagreb, Croatia. Entitled “Abandoned Soviet Monuments From the Future That Were Not—An Exercise in Speculative Analysis on the Viral Object, http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look.html, the seminar examined the digital and analog debris of Yugoslavia’s antifascist socialist-modernist monuments, attempting to question those monuments through the speculative exercise of group analysis dedicated to the demystification and critique of the Yugoslav modernist canon. Visit the Institute for Duration, Location, and Variables website for more information on the seminar.
Image: This monument is titled, “Podgarić” and is one of many featured monuments and structures found on the internet page, “http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look.html.”
