2021 David Buchan Lecture

2021 David Buchan Lecture
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This is a past event

Responding to Tragedy: A Folklorist Collects the Pandemic - Talk and Conversation

The last year has seen a wonderful variety of creative responses to the pandemic, from masks, memes, and signs to memorials and tributes. Prof. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will talk about how people give form to their values in everyday life, what these objects reveal, and what they mean in people’s lives. Grassroots creativity and resilience are evident everywhere in response to traumatic events, whether 9/11 almost two decades ago, or the COVID-19 pandemic today. These responses show tradition in action, adapting as it always does to new challenges. Folklorists are first responders on the cultural front, collecting the present and exploring dimensions of significance.

Listeners can contribute pictures of their own pandemic objects, some of which Prof. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will discuss in the second half.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, POLIN Museum Core Exhibition in Warsaw, and University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her publications include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and HeritageImage before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt); The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler).

Speaker
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett