With Stefanie Hofer (Virginia Tech), I am the co-chair of the ‘Witnessing’ Working Group from the Memory Studies Association: https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/non-members-groups/

WHAT IS THE WITNESSING WORKING GROUP?

How do we engage with the past on a personal and collective level when we are confronted with complicated pasts, for instance when visiting a Holocaust museum? What exists and lives between a place of suffering and time? How can we embrace historical moments through cultural representations, memorials and commemoration? Is it possible to provoke historical empathy while witnessing a place of suffering? Which influence do national political narratives have when visitors encounter local sites of memory? What is the main purpose of “memory tourism” (or remembrance tourism) to Auschwitz, Dachau, Srebrenica? Why do we choose to become witnesses to pain, and why does witnessing matter?

All of the above are questions that our ‘Witnessing’ research group attempts to address. Our main aim is to analyze how people react to artifacts, representations, memorials and commemorations of the difficult past. We are committed to understanding the complex phenomenon of witnessing and to exploring different modes of witnessing, including its active potential while also examining ethical challenges and limitations. With that in mind, we are especially interested in engaging with complicated and entangled pasts of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, but welcome researchers outside these geographical areas. This is an interdisciplinary research group and we would like to encourage  participation form scholars hailing from a wide range of disciplines, such as communication and performance studies, history, literature and film studies, pedagogy, political science, psychology, sociology, visual arts, etc.

Members of the ‘Witnessing’ Working Group meet quarterly. We aspire to collaborate on different projects and publications.

We also organize events, at times in collaboration with the Memory and Trauma Working Group, in which we share our current work-in-progress in the fields of Memory Studies and Trauma Studies (Memory Studies Association), with discussion and helpful insights to follow.

Our past events include:

16 November 2022. Work-in-progress session: Arleen Ionescu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Layers of Memory in Kuznetsov’s and Trubakov’s Babi Yar Narratives, and Annie Rappeport, University of Maryland College Park: The Hope of Memory to Influence Prevention of Atrocities in Cambodia.

13 November 2023. Work-in-progress session: Anastasia Felcher, Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies: Language of Trauma in Soviet Jewish Samizdat, and Tetiana Grebeniuk, Zaporizhzhia State Medical and Pharmaceutical University: Soviet Propaganda Techniques in the Focus of the Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema.

13 December 2023. Work-in-progress session: Yumi Notohara, Osaka College of Music: Echoes of War: Exploring the Memory Through Hiroshima’s A-Bombed Musical Instruments, and Tyler Wertsch, Bowling Green State University in Ohio: Remembering at the Intersections: Synthetic Memory, Affect, and Political Anxieties in Popular Cultural Texts.

19 March 2024. Work-in-progress session: Natalia Sineaeva-Pankowska, Independent Scholar: Holocaust Distortion in Eastern Europe: The Case of Moldova, and Annie St. John-Stark, Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia: Endlessness and Address: Trauma and Responsibilising in the Lisbon Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and Past and Present Pandemics.

6 May 2024. Work-in-progress session: Arleen Ionescu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Healing Past Wounds: The Shanghai Jewish Refugees, and Alan Martell, Indiana University, Bloomington: The Role of Affect in Shaping Queer Archivists’ Experiences while Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic.

12 June 2024: Documentary film presentation: Vapniarka: The Camp of Death, 2022, directed by Olga Ștefan, and discussion, followed by Questions and Answers with film director.

9 December 2024. Work-in-progress session: Dana Mihăilescu, University of Bucharest: Transgressing Normative Holocaust Representation in Post-2010 Nonfictional Comics: Visual Modes of Witnessing the Holocaust by Bullets in Leela Corman’s You Are Not a Guest.

29 May 2025. Work-in-progress session: Stefanie Hofer, Virginia Tech: “How Do I Live with My Desert?”: Tracing Memory Landscapes in the Namibian Film Taste of Rain, and Allan Martell, Indiana University, Bloomington: An Information Approach to Change: A Systematic Literature Review of Memory Activism and Information Activism.

5 June 2025. Book presentation: Stefan Cristian Ionescu, The Rodgers Center of Holocaust Education, Chapman University: Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

13 November 2025. Work-in-progress session: Elise Westin, The University of Adelaide, Virginia Tech: Affective Decolonial Poetics and Everyday War: Reading Belorusets’ War Diary, and Annie St. John-Stark, Thompson Rivers University Kamloops, British Columbia: Address and Redefined Identity in Catastrophe: Human-Caused and Natural Catastrophe Survivor Interviews.

In 2025 the members meet weekly for writing sessions.

For those who are interested in becoming members of our group or presenting their books / work in progress on witnessing, please contact us at hofer_at_vt.edu; arleen.ionescu_at_e-uvt.ro

Stay tuned for future events!