'Touching Photographs/Prompting Postmemories': Scholar Marianne Hirsch and Artist Sara Davidmann

** We apologise for the poor general picture quality in this video ** 3 June 2025 In this seminar, Marianne Hirsch and Sara Davidmann reflect on the very different ways the family photographs they inherited have shaped their work on family and cultural memory. What do photographs from the European Jewish world before the Holocaust tell us about Jewish life and how the legacies of its destruction have shaped subsequent generations? How do photographs carry memory? How do they prompt our own postmemories? The discussion will be based on Hirsch’s autobiographical and theoretical writing and Davidmann’s artistic practice. Speaker Details: Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Combining memoir, literature and photography, she writes about the transmission of memories of violent histories across generations, a process she has termed “postmemory.” Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, both co-authored with Leo Spitzer, as well as the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory. She is currently working on a book about reparative memory. Sara Davidmann is a multi-award-winning artist living and working in London. For over a decade (2011- ), Sara’s work has focused on her family history. Sara’s work has been exhibited in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, India and the United Kingdom and was the focus of three events at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Publications include three photography monographs. Sara has also published book chapters and journal articles contextualising her artwork, and she regularly gives artist’s talks. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a Philip Leverhulme Prize, a Fulbright Hays Scholarship, four Arts and Humanities Research Council awards and an Association of Commonwealth Universities Fellowship. Sara has a PhD in Photography (practice-based) from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. https://oclw.web.ox.ac.uk/event/jewis...