CIMS organises various events related to cultural identity and memory throughout the academic year. Staff and students from any discipline are welcome to attend these events and join in the conversation!
Seminar Series
Our institute welcomes leading scholars in the field of Memory Studies for guest lectures every year. At each lecture, one person will present a current research project for approximately 45 minutes; this will be followed by time for questions and discussion, including topics beyond the project presented.
Brown Bag Talks
Our Brown Bag talks are 60 minutes lunchtime sessions. The ongoing research work showcased in these sessions will give students and staff plenty of food for thought to munch on and discuss in an informal and cross-disciplinary environment. Come along and join in the discussion!
Postgrad Events
Our postgraduate events offer a space for students and early-career researchers to engage with current debates in memory studies. Currently, we offer a reading group, masterclasses and an annual symposium, to give PGs the chance to share and discuss their work.
Upcoming Events
05 November 2026 | 16.00–17.30 | Younger Hall, Seminar Room 1
The (An)Aesthetics of Fascism
Dr Zoë Roth, Associate Professor of French, Durham University
The resurgence of authoritarianism evokes troubling similarities with 1920s-1940s European fascist movements, which used entertaining spectacles to mask violent political ideologies. Fascism was quickly labeled the first ‘aesthetic’ form of politics—a narrative that endures today. Yet this story overlooks how fascism restricted the sensory experiences and aesthetic objects available to people. Propaganda dictated what people could watch and read; words were outlawed; and collective rituals homogenized bodily experience. This paper reassesses the relations between fascism and aesthetics. It argues that fascism radically constrained aesthetic experience, producing anaesthesia. It excavates this early aesthetics in a range of thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Gunter Anders, and develops the concept of ‘fascist anaesthesia’ to conceptualise how fascism deadens sensory worlds.
Dr Zoë Roth is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on embodiment, aesthetics, Jewish studies, and the politics of literary and visual form. Her current project, The Anaesthetics of Politics: Fascism, Form, and Aesthetic Experience, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, reconsiders the relationship between fascism and aesthetics through the concept of “fascist anaesthesia.” She is also the author of Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature and works on literary and visual representations of the Holocaust and Jewish art and literature.