Title: Memory work in protest movements: The case of the Greek 1960s
Speaker: Dr. Emilia Salvanou, Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (2020-2021)
Time: 3.30 pm.
Location: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/86156066567 (Meeting ID: 861 5606 6567)
Language: English
Abstract
Protest movements of the 1960s are usually investigated in relation to their political, cultural and social aspects, with special attention to their generational characteristics. Nevertheless, although these student and youth movements were orientated towards the future, the past served as a distinct field of reference, upon which memory work was painstakingly undertaken. This work was a vital part of the protest. It was necessary, in order to overcome the burden of the mainstream narratives regarding the recent past and to create a receptive space for the agents and the ideas of the protest movements. In this presentation, I will focus on the Greek case, especially in the early 1960s, and explore how memory culture and youth culture became entangled in a way that eventually reshaped the field of political contestation, popularized the claims and shaped the historical culture that prevailed in the decades that followed.
Bio
Emilia Salvanou is a historian of modern and contemporary history. She studied History at the University of Athens (1993), obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Aegean (2006), and completed her post-doctoral thesis at the University of Athens (2012). She has participated in various research projects with national and European funding and has lectured on Greek History (University of Thessaloniki), European History, and Public History (Hellenic Open University). Her latest affiliation was to Utrecht University, as a post-doc fellow in the research program “Remembering Activism: The cultural memory of protest in Europe.” She is the author of two monographs: The shaping of refugee memory. The past as history and as practice (in Greek, Athens: Nefeli 2018) and How we learn about the past: History education, public history and historical culture (in Greek, Athens: Asini 2021, forthcoming), and has published extensively in journals and edited volumes on topics of contemporary history, migration and refugeehood, memory, public history and historical culture.