HIST230 - History, Memory,And Nostalgia in Modern Europe

Karl Marx compared history to a nightmare weighing on the brains of the living, but it can also be a refuge, a source of inspiration, and a constant companion. In this course, we will consider our own relationship to the past as we navigate the boundaries and intersections of history, memory, and nostalgia. Reading will consist of plays, novels, music, film, television, and painting. From the traumas of the Holocaust and of Stalinism to the conflicted memory of empire, from preservation to imagination, we will consider a wide array of methods through which Europeans have engaged their past over the last two hundred and fifty years. How does the academic study of the past relate to individual and collective memories of it? If "living in the past" seems often seems counterproductive, and yearning for it often seems reactionary, in what ways can nostalgia be a force of progress? We will consider these questions as we study topics such as the birth of heritage movements in the nineteenth century, the formation of national museums, representations of war and violence, legacies of imperialism, and the history of memory after the cataclysms of the twentieth century. *Students may opt to write a longer research paper to fulfill the History Major research requirement.*