War and memory: Resistance, massacre and commemoration in second world war Italy

Through seminars, workshops and fieldwork this unit will examine how conflict has been represented, remembered and memorialised. The unit will have a specific focus on World War 2, the Italian Resistance, and the massacre of civilians in Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. The unit will consider how written and visual responses to these events, material forms of remembrance - monuments, memorials, museums, and cemeteries in, or within reach of Prato - each function to memorialise the dead and how in articulating political and national ideologies, such sites acknowledge and incorporate countervailing ideologies and the contradictory testimony of survivors. The unit will unpack, examine and critique the complex inter-relations between media, memory and war, exploring how in pursuit of specific political and cultural goals, memories of conflict are created, constructed and recovered through an array of artistic and memorial forms. You will be invited to move beyond a purely theoretical understanding of these issues by visiting museums, massacre sites and their memorials, examining and critiquing their mediation and creating a critical/creative response to one such site.