McLester Colloquium: The Objects that Remain

Building from her book, The Objects That Remain, Laura Levitt will consider the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. She will do this by considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country. What might it mean to do justice to violent pasts outside the juridical system or through historical empiricism, the dominant ways in which we think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic events? What do the objects that remain and the stories that surround them enable and what forms of intimacy are possible in our lives after? Levitt offers a form of companionship as a different kind of reckoning where justice becomes an animating process of telling and holding. While addressing the afterlives of trauma, she will also consider the relationship between traumatic once ordinary objects and those we continue to live with. What possessions do we let go of and which ones do we keep?

Additional co-sponsors: Carolina Seminar Religion and Theory Reading Group and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.