Commemorative Cultures with Kristen Treen

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 Kristen Treen studied for a BA in English (2009) at Jesus College, Cambridge, before completing her M.Phil in American Literature (2011) and her Ph.D (2017), as a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities, at King’s College, Cambridge. She joined the University of St Andrews in 2018.