Rebecca Dolgoy

Rebecca Dolgoy’s work sits at the intersection of memory studies and cultural studies. Her research addresses transformations of public memory in urban landscapes in dialogue with broader transcultural and transnational trends. She holds a DPhil in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and her doctoral project explored contemporary museum practices in Berlin. As a visiting fellow at London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research (2015) and, subsequently, as a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ottawa (2015-2017), she expanded the scope of her research to include other memory/commemorative contexts.

During the 2017-2018 academic year, Rebecca will be both a research/teaching fellow and the managing director of the Centre for Transcultural Analysis at Carleton University in Ottawa and a visiting fellow at the ICI Berlin. She will develop and run a collaborative project bringing researchers at these institutions together in a joint effort to engage with contemporary culture in both cities. Her next major research project, Architectures of Reconciliation, is a transnational study of multiple post-conflict architectures. She regularly collaborates with museums and other partner organizations in order to facilitate public engagement with heritage (e.g., Ottawa’s Cultural Memory Workshops and ‘Object Affinity’ at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum).

Architecture is one expression of the Promethean impulse: fire builds, fire burns, fire re-builds. The idea of ‘re-’ in the sense of ‘re-building’, ‘re-thinking’, ‘re-constellating’, ‘re-conciling’ is at the core of this project. What kind of architectures can contribute to on-going processes of reconciliation? Architectures of Reconciliation examines post-conflict architecture that evokes some expression of adaptive re-use in Germany, Canada, South Africa, and Iraq with the aim of elaborating a rigorous and multivalent critical concept.

The project will test the usefulness of the German concept Vergangenheitsbewältigung (critically working through the past) for transnational frameworks of reconciliation, and investigate the circuit of exchange between local, national, and transnational frames of commemoration.