Sophie added themselves to the department Centre for History of Emotions and changed an About section.
Sophie changed a CV.
Sophie changed an About section, a position.
Post-Doc, British and American Studies
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Centre for History of Emotions
Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doc Fellow
Thesis Title: Trauma, memory and performance: towards an embodied ethics of secondary witnessing
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Costas Douzinas
Lynne Segal |
About
My current research is concerned with the practice and experience of ‘secondary witnessing’ (a concept that refers to the ethical or moral dimension of mediated encounters with collective trauma) in the specific context of sites of cultural memory of the Holocaust in Berlin. The project aims to bring practical social concerns in the field of human rights education into dialogue with theoretical concepts and alternative, interdisciplinary modes of thought. I examine Holocaust memory work in Berlin not from the perspective of memorial makers, but from the perspective of the visitors to, spectators of, and interlocutors with memorials. The spectator in this context is not envisaged as passive receiver but as active agent; performing the role of a new kind of witness for our age. My research is thus concerned with the moment of ‘spectatorial performance’ in the encounter with memorials, a performance conceived as an aesthetic experience that is sensory, responsive and relational, as well as creative in its own right. This is an interdisciplinary project that engages with theories of spectatorship and reception as they have been developed in various areas of critical thought, including art, literature, film and performance theory, as well as memory and history studies. As a complement to this theoretical approach, the project involves empirical research into visitor experiences of three Holocaust memorial projects in Berlin. As the new (old) capital of reunified Germany, Berlin is a city at the centre of historical debate and offers a unique setting in which to examine individual encounters with and responses to such representations; a setting in which highly conceptual memorialisation works alongside the encounter with ‘authentic’ historical sites and artefacts.
