The 2025 HGMS annual graduate symposium, initiated in 2018, came back after a year’s pause after the 2023 annual symposium and much to everyone’s delight, the range of papers presented by scholars from different disciplines, both UIUC and UCLA, took us on a memory journey both temporally and spatially. Since its successful reception in 2022, HGMS graduate symposium has retained its hybrid format, and this year was no different. Besides enthusiastic presentations attended by university friends and colleagues at the Levis Faculty Hall venue on March 28, 2025, we also had many students, scholars, and faculty members joining in over zoom.
This year, we had two keynote presentations, delivered virtually, as the day started. The first keynote speaker was Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Ghosh engages in graphic novels, documentaries, arts and storytelling. He uses the medium of comics and graphic storytelling as a narrative form to communicate on issues and everyday stories across South Asia. He is the author of the graphic novel ‘Delhi Calm’ (2010). Set during ‘The Emergency’ of 1975 to 1977, the graphic novel brings together realistic comic passages with political commentaries and fantastical elements. In 2013, he curated ‘This Side That Side: Restorying Partition’, an anthology of graphic narratives by 48 illustrators and authors from South Asia. He is also an avid podcaster as a medium of storytelling with his popular podcast ‘Kissa Stories’, available across all major platforms. Ghosh’s keynote started with the attempt to define the ‘other’ in the context of identity formation. He talked about how the ‘other’ is always situated in a web of connections to the ‘self’, and how the ‘other’ is a manufactured concept. He also raised some thought provoking questions for the audience in the room—How does memory change/get affected when people are separated by borders, when people are forced to move away from home? How do people deal with the lack of the sense of belonging? How do we negotiate with the notion of the ‘other’ when memory fails to recognize the past in a way it was remembered? What happens if you find yourself missing in the other?
Our second keynote speaker was Dr. Rituparna Roy who talked about the artwork of Debasish Mukherjee in the context of the virtual Kolkata Partition Museum. Her focus on archiving displacement and loss, and taking up a memory project through building a unique virtual museum was inspired by her 2007 visit to Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Berlin. Through a presentation of Mukherjee’s art installations, Roy explored his use of fabrics (the gamcha—an indigenous red and white striped cotton cloth that has been used as a symbol of resistance during the colonial period in India, or later remained as people’s only means of bundling up their essentials as they were forced to migrate during the 1947 partition), paintings that embody Mukerjee’s mother’s memories, as well as architectures and paintings that serve as a reminder of his generational loss. Rituparna Roy is Initiator of the Kolkata Partition Museum Project that aims to establish a Partition Museum in Kolkata, focusing on the Bengal experience. An alumna of Presidency College and Calcutta University, she has taught at several institutions in Kolkata, Leiden, and The Hague. She is the author of South Asian Partition Fiction in English: From Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh (Amsterdam University Press: 2010) & co-editor of the ICAS Volume, Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010 (Amsterdam University Press: 2013). Her latest book is a co-edited volume of essays, The Long History of Partition in Bengal: Event, Memory, Representations (Routledge: 2024).
In the first panel titled Fleeting Archives, our presenters consider the shape of memory in terms of its medium, temporality, and how it relates to legacies of the Holocaust. Jared Cohen questions writing’s ability to preserve memories and the possibilities of monuments in place of speech acts. If attention is the root of memory, he asks, how do we address this attention if one has no language to speak of it? How else can memory reconcile beyond the speech act of constructing and reinforcing? Sara Berlowe’s essay considers translating the limitless and unspeakable, as it interrogates various models of linear and circular time. In a nod towards new directions of theorizing memory, her work ponders the new shapes that might emerge from temporal discourse. Kelsi Quick and Eylül Begüm Sağlam’s research questions how past events are reconstructed and remembered. Fresh off the 2025 German federal elections where the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party garnered a record 20.8% of the popular vote on a party platform of nativism and belonging, Quick and Sağlam’s study gains renewed resonance as it taps into the zeitgeist of how legacies of national memory shape a community’s sense of belonging. Next, taking us across the Atlantic, Zachary Jablow and Tianhong Yin explore German Holocaust memory through the lens of the U.S. They examine how the Holocaust’s legacy shapes popular discourse in the U.S. about what counts as a genocide, and how this definition is shaped by popular media.
The second panel for the day focused on the theme of Memory and Hauntology. The presenters in this section raised questions about figures, specters, identities that have been ignored, marginalized, and often been left out of the discourse surrounding nation and history. Trinidad Gomez brought up the figure of the ‘golem’ and traced its historiography that looks at the golem as protector but also as a figure of caution. deniz atakan gürbüz’s paper examines the intertwined histories of Armenians and trans women with a focus on trans women who worked as sex workers and were victims of forced displacement and violence. It takes into consideration trans funerals and aspects of public grief vis-à-vis memory and haunting. Samantha Ting took the audience on a journey through Medoruma Shun’s collection of short stories which explores the blurred liminal space between magical and real, and addressed the complex question of history and memory in Okinawa. She discussed how these literary texts draw attention towards marginalized figures in society such as the elderly, women, children, and migrant workers, while creating the trajectory for the emergence of an Okinawan identity. At the same time, her work raises questions of ambivalence and implicated subjecthood. The last presenter before the panels broke for lunch was Alex Lyon who brought up the importance of ‘double witnessing’ in the context of Nazi Germany. Civilians, irrespective of their side in the war, were suggested to witness the atrocities of the Holocaust—piles of corpses and the violence of the camps where Jews had been imprisoned and killed. Through a close reading of different media as texts, Lyon explored its role in shaping public memory.
The papers presented as a part of the third panel, explored Memory Writing during crisis, across space and time such as postcolonial nation-states, gendered experiences of the Holocaust, and in imperial as well as diasporic spaces. Elif Isik began her presentation by addressing loss and erasure, namely, the fact that only a few memoirs of the (women, eunuchs, concubines) slaves of the harems exist. She extended her argument to explore how, in her words, ‘…the harem (works) as a key site of memory–remembered, imagined, denigrated, glamorized, sexualized, and politicized’ within the national memory of Turkey and has been reproduced through three visual texts (mainly dramas). Liliana Lule discussed al-Andalus and explored it as an idealized space (past). She further complicated her argument by bringing in the resistance poet Mahmoud Darwish as well as critical thinkers like Lorna Hardwick and Eric Calderwood and their scholarship that provides a contemporary dialogue vis-à-vis discussions of Palestinian postcolonial futurities. Aishi Bhattacharya brought up the importance of food in shaping, preserving, and defining a space for Arabic culture within North America as diasporic settlements negotiate with the memories of a homeland left behind and migration towards a new life. Through reading a poem about “coffee” she analyzed the themes of identity and belonging and the challenges that come with bringing ethnic food across borders. Stephanie Bowers’ research focused on intersections of gender and genocidal violence in the context of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. She raises questions about erasure of memory while speaking about Jewish women in Nazi concentration camps. Situating her work at the intersection of gender and Holocaust Studies, Bowers explores the complexity of archiving memory when it is male dominated and women’s voices get suppressed or worse, deleted from official discourse.
The theme for the fourth and final panel of the day was Oceanic Interconnections. Peihan Wan talked about modern Japan and nuclear memory and raised important points about how scholars engage in understanding memory through geological time, slow memory, and environmental memory. Alexander Williams’ work is situated at the wake of the Zong massacre. Drawing upon M. NourbeSe Philip’s scholarship, he narrated how a literary documentation in the form of a legal text about the 150 ghosts of the massacre, contributed to a writing/re-writing/remembering of Black history and archive formation. Matthew Fam explored and unpacked archipelagic memory at the intersection of energy infrastructure and documentary theatre through a reading of the play Playing With Fire (2024). He also raised questions about indigenous memory and erasure by underlining how personal memory is entangled with material and industry. Taisuke L. Wakabayashi’s work addresses how memory interacts with postwar architecture—art installations and museum spaces in the context of a political memory such as the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombing. Wakabayashi delved deeper into the questions of mnemopolitics and the challenges that arise when sites of remembrance bear similarities to an imperial design/structure.
The papers presented as a part of the HGMS conference this year restates the role of Memory Studies as an interlocutor of narratives, while speaking truth to power. Be it speaking out against marginalization, anti-democratic governments across the globe, or necessary interventions of looking back onto history in more equitable terms, the 6th Annual HGMS Graduate Student Symposium interrogates ways of excavating these stories.
Ragini Chakraborty and Matthew Fam are graduate students in Comparative and World Literatures at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
