Brown Bag Talks 2025/26

This talk will introduce the rationale behind Commemorative Cultures: The U.S. Civil War Monuments Project, a collaborative digital heritage project I run from within the School of English, via a discussion of literary responses to some of the Civil War’s (1861-1865) first monuments and early theorisations of monumental function, especially in the victorious northern states. Monuments to the southern Confederacy’s ‘Lost Cause’ have dominated debates about the place of Civil War monuments in contemporary public spaces, and widespread condemnation of the white supremacist values such objects preserve and perpetuate has inflected scattered discussions of the North’s monuments, which have critiqued the pitfalls of monuments to Emancipation and the uses of monuments to Union as tools for social control. This talk will think with and around Gary Yongue’s assertion that public monuments are ‘among the most fundamentally conservative […] expressions of public art’, and seek to challenge some of the assumptions attendant on monumental forms and the feelings they inspire, by dwelling on poet Emily Dickinson’s responses to a curious monument dedicated early on in the war, in Amherst Massachusetts. Plumbing the intimate affective response Dickinson experiences when faced with one of the first monuments to the Civil War, I’ll explore the northern Civil War monument’s status as a potent site of subjective and mnemonic transformation, and ask what Dickinson’s personal encounter with the monument as a dynamic, rhetorically-constituted object might mean for attempts to interpret and manage Civil War monuments today.

Dr. Abigail Karas is an anthropologist and historian of the built environment, with a particular focus on (post-)Soviet cityscapes. Her work moves seamlessly across disciplines, drawing on anthropology, urban history, heritage, and cultural studies to explore how space and identity interact in the shifting landscapes of the post-socialist world.

Her current research investigates how national and civic identities have been constructed in the Republic of Moldova since its independence from the Soviet Union looking in particular at how architecture and urban planning have been used to express ideas of Moldovan nationhood, and how citizens respond to and reshape these visions in their everyday environments.

In her talk she examines the concept of “ruralization” in Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova. By challenging conventional narratives of urbanization as a unilinear process, it argues that rural identities and practices persist and are reasserted within Chișinău’s urban spaces, blurring the urban-rural boundary. This hybridity, influenced by Moldova’s complex history under various imperial rules, is evident in vernacular architecture, subsistence practices, and a cultural valorization of the village as a core national identity marker. The talk contends that Chișinău’s “urban rurality” offers an alternative vision of urban life, resisting teleological models of modernity and fostering a unique socio-spatial landscape.