Professor Anne Fuchs of the School of Modern Languages, will deliver her Inaugural Lecture 'The Dreadful Wreckage of History: Cultural Memory and the Bombing of Dresden’ in School III, St Salvator’s Quadrangle on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 at 5.15 p.m. All are welcome.
Professor Fuchs’ fields of research span various aspects of the literatures and cultures of the German speaking countries from the late 18th century to the present day. Nationally and internationally, she is renowned for her work on German cultural memory since 1945. For a number of years, her research has been particularly concerned with 'German memory contests', i.e. a series of intensely fought public debates about German cultural identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II. Her latest monograph investigates these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective with reference to the local, national and global memory of the bombing of Dresden. She is author of five monographs, amongst them After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (2012), the award-winning Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse (2008, 2nd ed. 2010), Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte: Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Prosa (2004), and has co-edited nine volumes. Her latest research project concerns cultural responses to the experience of acceleration in the age of the World Wide Web. At St Andrews, she intends to build up a cross-disciplinary research network with colleagues from cognate disciplines to explore 'modes of temporality in the age of acceleration', the topic of her next book.