Cultural_Memory

A critical auto-vivisection of my relationship with the dead subject of my research, exploring, among other things, Blanchot's notion of irreducible difference, the impact of Josef Beuys and Anselm Kiefer on my work as a biographer, and the day I turned into a character in an AS Byatt novel.

""The Bee Kingdom is a family memoir in progress that will be accompanied by an online visual archive focusing on the life of my maternal grandfather: scientist, beekeeper and Egyptian Romantic poet Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). Abushady was an instrumental figure, both as a poet and as publisher and founder of the Modernist literary group “Apollo” and its eponymous journal that became the seminal organ of the Romantic poets in the Modern Arabic poetry movement in Egypt’s “Old Regime” (ca. 1920s-40s). He was also a physician and bacteriologist who is still known in certain circles for having definitively revolutionized beekeeping at an international scale. His work started in England, where he attended medical school, and later in Egypt where he returned in 1922 and raised a family. In addition to inventing the first standardized, aluminum honeycomb, which he patented in 1919, Abushady founded, designed, edited and published several early important bee research journals: The Bee World in England, and later The Bee Kingdom in Cairo. Contributors were international and ranged from local bee farmers to renowned entomologists; the latter journal was bilingual English and Arabic. Abushady’s aim in bee husbandry, as in literature, was ecological and cultural richness through selection, experimentation and hybridity.
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This paper evaluates the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as an exercise in public history. Public events have been widely identified within the study of nationalism as festivals that attempt to reinforce national identity and belonging. Contemporary Olympic Games figure in this literature as a specific form of event where the nature and content of a host state's identity is displayed for the global gaze of other nations. While opening ceremonies perform a rich display of national identity in any case, London 2012 is particularly significant for taking place at a time of major political contestation in the UK and has frequently been interpreted as an expression of radical patriotism. Traces of such patriotic thought associated particularly with England can be found in the opening ceremony's historical pageant and overall concept, showing resonances with the work of Raphael Samuel, who argued for a radical patriotism grounded in a multiplicity of accounts of the national past from many social positions. Depicting the nation through a multiplicity of biographical narratives produces a ‘mosaic’ mode of representation which can be seen in other documentary and public history projects and in the political context of British public multiculturalism in the 2000s. This responds to the need for any national narrative to be composed through compressing the lives of millions of people into one coherent story, but complicates attempts to read a text such as the opening ceremony for what they ‘really’ mean. A model for understanding narratives of the past as being produced in interaction between their initial creator(s) and their reader(s) is necessary for understanding not only the London 2012 opening ceremony in particular but also public history and narratives of the national past in general.

""The mythology and the imaginaries of a place are generated, contested and consumed in different ways. Portbou is a Catalan village considered by many as one a genuine European lieux de mèmoire. Internationally known for being the place where Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) committed suicide while trying to scape from German police, Portbou’s meaning remains deeply linked to the philosopher’s very special ‘aura’, which nowadays attracts many 'tourist of history', to put it following Marita Sturken. This is largely due to Dani Karavan’s memorial in honor of Benjamin (1994), and jointly funded by both German and Catalan governments, right after the fall of Berlin wall.
Benjamin’s tragic death embodies the tragedy of what Hobsbawm labeled as the Age of Extremes. Its meaning, however, is far from being obvious. Many contemporary artist, writers and filmmakers –both national and international- have either entirely or partially located their works within this space, thus aiming to capitalise Portbou’s historical meaning to place new narratives that concern such issues as defeat, loss, memory or violence. Throughout this process, however, both Portbou’s people and its local history are frequently ignored. Hence, the perception of place becomes deeply determined by those mnemonic devices that turn the city into an imagined theatre of loss and mourning, in other words, a landscape of defeat. 
This paper aims to track various narratives that converge within Portbou’s urban space, mapping out the genealogy of the local uses of history focusing on the history of both the discourses and the practices around Benjamin’s figure. It will also try to highlight that Portbou served as a platform from which participate in the struggle over the political meaning of Europe´s troubling past, in other words, as a platform to materialise the past in concordance with Benjamin´s though.
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"In the annals and chronicles of the Italian city-states from before the second half of the 1200s, on occasion passages from letters or entire epistles useful for determining the political context of the reported events can be found. This paper shows how the majority of these are authentic documents interwoven with the narrative discourse, and evidences a marked variation in the chronology of the phenomenon: letters are frequent adjuncts to the narrative text in the 13th century, while they are less common in the preceding century. This practice does not appear to be significantly affected by geography, and the presence or absence of letters is more dependent on the tone and type of literature. Indeed, exemplary texts are full of epistolary writings, while they are conspicuously absent in vehement partisan pamphlets.
The principal texts considered are: the Annales Ianuenses, the Annales Pisani by Bernardo Maragone, the annals by Ottone and Acerbo Morena, the Annales Placentini by Codagnello, the Annales Placentini Ghibellini, the Gesta Florentinorum by Sanzanome, the Chronicon Faventinum by Tolosano, the Liber de obsidione civitatis Anchonae by Boncompagno da Signa, and the Chronica by Rolandino da Padova.

"Negli annali e nelle cronache dei comuni italiani fino alla seconda metà del Duecento si trovano talvolta brani di lettere o intere epistole utili a illustrare il contesto politico degli eventi riportati. Nel saggio si mostra come esse siano – in gran parte – documenti autentici inseriti nel discorso narrativo. Il fenomeno ha indubbiamente una variabilità cronologica: la presenza di lettere nella narrazione è frequente nelle opere del pieno secolo XIII, mentre è ridotta nei lavori del secolo precedente. Meno significativa è la variazione a seconda delle aree geografiche. Tuttavia la presenza o l'assenza di lettere segnala soprattutto una distinzione di tono e di genere letterario: opere manualistiche, esemplari, le narrazioni intessute di brani epistolari; pamphlets veementi e partigiani quelle prive di inserti.
I principali testi presi in considerazione sono: gli 'Annales Ianuenses', gli 'Annales Pisani' di Bernardo Maragone, gli annali di Ottone e Acerbo Morena, gli 'Annales Placentini' di Codagnello, gli 'Annales Placentini Ghibellini', i 'Gesta Florentinorum di Sanzanome', il 'Chronicon Faventinum' di Tolosano, il 'Liber de obsidione civitatis Anchonae' di Boncompagno da Signa, la 'Chronica' di Rolandino da Padova.""

There is currently a great interest among scholars of early modern culture in the theory of translation, the emergence of national consciousness, and the role of foreign languages and foreign people in fiction and society.  There have been many localized studies of these issues with respect to Shakespeare, with no consensus as to how they should be addressed.  This lack of consensus is understandable, because there are fundamentally different questions at play: How were foreigners characterized in England?  How does Shakespeare stage them?  How was translation perceived?  How were foreigners received, legally, economically and socially?  Are postcolonial and psychoanalytic methodologies useful in addressing these questions?  Can current developments in translation theory be applied to the Renaissance?  The diversity of this discourse is useful to my investigation of Shakespeare and France, because France has such a complex presence in England.  In the first chapter, I construct a methodology for approaching Shakespeare’s treatment of England’s most significant neighbor, which Sir Philip Sidney called a “sweet enemy.”  The subsequent chapters are divided by genre; I argue that Shakespeare uses the idea of France in different ways in history, comedy and tragedy.  Thus, I articulate new ways to explore dramatic genre, and I advance the understanding of language and national identity in the early modern marketplace. This study emerges from a wide, interdisciplinary conversation, and is designed to be relevant to that conversation, but most of this work is a structured exploration of Shakespeare’s plays.  The book offers strategic analysis of a wide range of Shakespeare's works, sustained original readings of three plays, and two subtle expansions of Shakespeare's sources.  Most importantly, it offers a coherent theorization of Shakespeare's treatment of France.

" The Great War is arguably one of the most significant conflicts in recent history. In this centenary year of the beginning of the First World War, as the grand narratives about the conflict come under renewed scrutiny and debate this conference focuses on the alternative forms of war heritagisation and commemoration emerging globally. In exploring other voices disregarded by the mainstream grand narratives of European geopolitics, we aim to explore the weight of how we are inheriting 1914. With over 50 million pounds being invested in the UK in local communities' projects to re-establish claims on the memory of 1914 we are interested in exploring perspectives from the periphery (ie local, indigenous, former colonies and other previously overlooked regions). This 15th Cambridge Heritage Seminar seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners from a wide array of disciplines and communities of practice to explore the range of narratives being constructed.

Paper proposals are due by 15 February to 15heritageseminar@gmail.com. They should clearly outline the questions that will be addressed and the empirical evidence or case study that will be drawn on. The proposals should not exceed 400 words and should be accompanied by a short (150 word) biographical note."

In 1812 the Swedish explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in Aleppo could meet the Spanish traveler Ali Bey (Domingo Badia and Leblich) conducted one of the most important discoveries of the time during one of his many trips to locate first the capital of ancient Nabataean kingdom, Petra.