The Graduate Student History Association of Claremont Graduate University
is pleased to announce its third annual spring conference: “Nostalgia and
Amnesia: Avenues of Remembering and Forgetting.”

This conference will focus on “Nostalgia and Amnesia” as guiding themes for
understanding how the past has been idealized, commodified, re-presented,
and consumed, while often simultaneously being forgotten, sanitized or
anesthetized. Nostalgia and amnesia are often inseparable and also mutually
reinforcing phenomena, yet both concepts offer a distinct prism through
which to explore the past. Whether in film, television, literature, non-fiction,
comics, commercials, art, photography, museums, monuments, architecture,
sculptures, or the internet there has never been a time period with more
technology to preserve the archive of the past, and representing the past
has never been more popular or wide-ranging. These various media and
modalities influence all levels of society—political, social, and cultural. By
exploring these phenomena, this conference hopes to record and analyze
the multiform ways we forget, represent and code the past.

Papers topics need not be explicitly about nostalgia or amnesia. Papers from
a range of disciplines are welcomed and encouraged in an effort to explore
the ideas of nostalgia, amnesia, and memory in general from multiple
viewpoints.

The conference will be held on the Claremont Graduate University campus
on March 25th and 26th. Paper abstracts of 250 words or less must be
submitted by email to gsha@cgu.edu by January 1st, 2011.