Monuments & Memory

How do communities and individuals remember? How and why do they forget? What modes of collective memory help us to engage productively with the past? Which practices, in contrast, tend to mythologize and oversimplify history?

This exhibition documents a collaborative effort to address these and other thorny questions. What we learned as a collaborative transatlantic team of teachers and students from Flagler College and Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg is that the answers to the how, what, and why of memory practices proved to be as varied and thought-provoking as the questions we started with.

The five virtual rooms of the exhibition – Mobilities & Migration, Media of Memory, Personal & Public Remembrance, Cultural Landscapes, and Teaching Memory – showcase student-developed projects in multiple media: videocasts, podcasts, and textual-visual essays. We invite visitors to read, listen, watch, and ponder dynamics of remembering and forgetting with us as part of the ongoing Flagler-JMU collaboration in Transatlantic Cultures & Histories.

These efforts began with the WueGlobal – Writing, Learning, Digital Connection (2020-2021) and WueGlobal Transatlantic Cultures & Histories (2021-2022) projects generously funded by the German Academic Exchange Service |  Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Federal Ministry of Education & Research | Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) within the International Virtual Academic Cooperation (IVAC)  Initiative.

We thank our original institutional sponsors DAAD | BMBF as well as cooperating colleagues and departments at Flagler College and JMU Würzburg. Most of all, however, thanks go to the wonderfully engaged students and those who shared their perspectives and expertise in the student-developed contributions.