CONWAY, Ark. (February 3, 2013) - The Hendrix College Department of History will host "Past Obsessions: World War II in History and Memory," a lecture and discussion by Dr. Carol Gluck, on Thursday, Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. in Worsham Student Performance Hall - South - in the Student Life and Technology Center.
More than 65 years after it ended, the Second World War remains a contested issue in history and memory. Dr. Gluck's lecture will discuss how examples from Europe, Asia, and North America help us to understand both how public memory operates in contemporary societies and how entrenched national war stories change or do not change over time, and the challenges posed by the present surge of memory for what we used to call history.
Dr. Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University and an Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council's Distinguished Speaker. Her field is the history of modern Japan from the mid-19th century to the present. She writes and teaches about the political, social, and cultural history of Japan in transnational perspective, World War II, history-writing and public memory in Asia and the West. Her books include Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (1985); Showa: the Japan of Hirohito (1992); Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (2009); Thinking with the Past: Modern Japan and History (2012); Past Obsessions: World War II in History and Memory (forthcoming); and, in Japanese, Rekishi de kangaeru (Thinking about History, 2007). Her most recent article is "The End of Elsewhere: Writing Modernity Now," American Historical Review (June 2011).
The program is sponsored by the Hendrix College History Department and Asian Studies Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Hendrix Crossings Program, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. For more information, contact Hendrix history professor Dr. Michael Sprunger at sprunger@hendrix.edu or (501)450-4577.
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the fifth consecutive year, Hendrix was named one of the country's "Up and Coming" liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report. Hendrix is featured in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review as one of the country's best 377 colleges, the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges, Forbes magazine's annual list of America's Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.