2021SP - STUDIES IN CHAPS 16:082:594:01

This cultural heritage seminar course explores the history and material culture of the memorialization of individuals, social groups, and historic events through time, cultures, and landscapes. Our course material will include local, national, and global case studies and examples drawn from the fields of cultural heritage, cultural resource management, historic preservation, archaeology, anthropology, history, art history, death studies, landscape architecture, and the contemporary world. Why and how do we choose to remember/memorialize some individuals and events over others? What does the form and design of cemeteries, monuments, and monuments reveal about communities, culture, politics, and cultural/historical memory? Which memorial sites and spaces stay secular – and which become sacred ground? How are material objects and art spaces used in acts of grief, memory, and commemoration? How and when do acts of memorialization become vehicles for mediating and reinterpreting the past? How and why do some sites associated with the dead and historic events become contested ground while others are forgotten? What is the role and purpose of “dark tourism” and studies of “negative heritage” as part of remembering and forgetting in the contemporary world?