Event

We are excited to host Professor Jeffrey Andrew Barash, University of Amiens, France, discussing his recent book with the University of Chicago Press, Collective Memory and the Historical Past (2016).

Professor Warren Breckman, UPenn, History will join Professor Barash as respondent.  

This event is made possible by the generous support of the Department of History, the Department of Philosophy, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. 

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On Collective Memory and the Historical Past From the University of Chicago Press: 

"There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils important limitations to its scope in relation to the historical past."

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After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and his Habilitation à diriger des recherches en philosophie at the Université de Paris X Nanterre, Jeffrey Andrew Barash taught in the philosophy department at the University of Amiens in France, where he is now professor emeritus.  His books include Heidegger et son siècle. Temps de l'Être, temps de l'histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (second, paperback edition, New York:  Fordham University Press, 2003), Politiques de l'histoire.  L'historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).  He has also edited a book entitled The Social Construction of Reality.  The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). He has just completed a book entitled Collective Memory and the Historical Past (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and is preparing a book on the theme of political mythology.