Current Institutional Affiliation
Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, History, and Jewish studies, Pennsylvania State University / University Park

Award Information

International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2009
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
History, City University of New York (CUNY) / Graduate Center
Mute Memories: Menmotic Sites of Hiroshima, 1945-1995

My project investigates the history of the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park through a two layered comparison with the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. By looking at both the institutional development of the memorial and the museum, on one hand, and the commemoration activities of survivors and other civil society groups, on the other, I intend to capture the dialectical way that hegemonic and counter memories intersected. These two narratives will be not only compared but also tied together through their shared history as part of the postwar global memory discourse. Following the methodology of histoire croisee, or entangled history, I intend to examine both sites as two instances of entanglement; two histories which from the very beginning were subject to the same global forces that shaped and were shaped by them. This will enable us to understand the development of memory sites beyond the limitations of the "container" of the nation state and capture the way both the personal and the global affected the supposedly "national" memory culture and its progressive fragmentation.

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