Current Project

Marianne Hirsch
Department of English and Comparative Literature


Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former  President of the Modern Language Association of America. She was born in Romania and educated at Brown University, where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees.

Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her most recent books are Imagining Everyday Life: Encounters with Vernacular Photography (Steidl, 2020 / Winner of the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation’s Photography Catalogue of 2020), School Pictures in Liquid Time: Reframing Differenceco-written with Leo Spitzer (University of Washington Press, 2019) and Women Mobilizing Memoryco-edited with Ayse Gul Altinay, Maria Jose Contreras, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon (Columbia University Press, 2019). 

Other books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (University of California Press, 2010), Rites of Return: Diaspora, Poetics and the Politics of Memory, co-edited with Nancy K. Miller (Columbia University Press, 2011). With Diana Taylor she co-edited the Summer 2012 issue of e-misférica on “The Subject of Archives.” Other publications include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), The Familial Gaze (ed. 1999), Time and the Literary (co-ed.2002), a special issue of Signs on “Gender and Cultural Memory” (co-ed. 2002), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (co-ed. 2004), and Grace Paley Writing the World (co-ed. 2009).  She is currently at work on a series of essays on stateless imaginaries.



Current Project

Zip Code Memory Project

The Zip Code Memory Project seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.

Description

Through a series of art-based workshops, public events, social media platforms, and a performance/exhibition at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, community members re-imagine Zip Codes not as zones of separation but as interrelated spaces for connectivity and mutual care. Read more

Scholar
Marianne Hirsch