Experiencing War Memorials: Place, Feeling, and Public Memory

Editor: Dr. Jennifer K. Ladino

War memorialization is an emotional as well as an ideological process–and one that is profoundly shaped by the physical environment at memorial sites. This volume of essays aims to better understand commemorative processes by gathering scholarship at the interdisciplinary confluence of war studies, affect studies, public memory studies, and the environmental humanities. War memorials and public commemoration have been controversial subjects in the U.S. and elsewhere in recent years. What counts as “heritage” as well as how—and where—we should appropriately mark historical and ongoing violence are hotly debated issues. Although public discourse frequently gets emotional, scholarship too often neglects the messy affective dimensions of public memory, especially when historical and ongoing trauma tied to war and violence are at stake. How do emotions such as guilt, pride, shame, regret, nostalgia, patriotism, and outrage function in commemorating war? What new forms are war memorials taking, and how do these forms and their mnemonic features—statues, cemeteries, and walls of names, but also sculptures, digital archives, museum exhibits, holographs, uniforms, and other artifacts—carry affective dimensions? How do environmental features shape visitors’ affective and intellectual apprehension of the legacies of violence and injustice? In what senses might the violence connected to climate change be considered “war”?

This CFP invites contributors from a range of disciplinary, historical, and national contexts to address these or related questions. The editor seeks to showcase a diverse range of genres (literature, art, music, and film, etc.) and physical sites, including museums, urban centers, public squares, virtual memorials, and tourist sites such as national and state parks. Time period and geographic focus are open, to encourage a broad approach to the subject matter, including theoretical frameworks and intersections that are applicable across a range of nations, historical periods, and forms of violence. Topics may include:

• war memorialization and affect theory

• the relationship between the physical environment and public feeling at sites of war remembrance

• war memorialization and forms of trauma and injustice, including colonization, capitalism, racism, and environmental destruction

• violence, commemoration, and climate change and/as war

• literature, film, emotion, and war commemoration

• emotions and affective atmospheres in commemorative spaces (landscapes, soundscapes, museums, tourist sites, etc.)

• guilt, shame, regret, pride, anger, outrage, patriotism, and other specific emotions in war memorialization

• uniforms and other artifacts and/as commemorative objects

• digital archives and virtual war memorials

• how and why war memorials produce different emotions over time

Please send a 250-300-word abstract and a CV by September 1, 2023 to Dr. Jennifer Ladino at jladino@uidaho.edu. Full manuscripts for selected submissions will be due in January of 2024. The University of Alabama Press has agreed to review the completed manuscript of the collection for possible inclusion in its “War, Memory, and Culture” series.