In this blog post, Michal Korhel explores the March of Gratitude dedicated to the Slovak National Uprising (SNP) as a present-day form of commemoration that blends physical participation with mediated remembrance. Drawing on participant observation and informal conversations with attendees, he reflects on how walking through historically significant landscapes can foster a form of experiential memory. At the same time, this dimension of memory often remains subtle and unarticulated.

Michal points to a tension between immediate, lived experience and the symbolic frameworks that seek to give the event a clear commemorative meaning. He suggests that the significance of the march tends to emerge retrospectively, if it emerges at all, rather than being fully realized in the moment of participation.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

In February, our team had the pleasure of hosting a seminar with Brett Ashley Kaplan, Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. During the seminar, our guest presented not only a portion of her research but also offered insight into the creative process behind her recent book on the now-vanished village of Seneca Village, located in the nineteenth century on the grounds of what is today Central Park in New York City.

Together, we reflected on what “haunting” truly means—whether it should be understood solely as a feature associated with figures (“human” ghosts), or whether it may also belong to objects. This question resonated particularly strongly in the context of our project, which explores the agency of things and the material traces of the past. The conversation then expanded to the issue of memory tied to specific spaces—how bringing new information about the past to light affects contemporary communities and what kinds of reactions it can provoke. We also considered the differences between the work of writers and scholars—how both groups gather and interpret data, construct narratives, and combine facts with imagination.

For our team, the seminar only broadened our research perspective but also opened up new questions about the relationship between place, memory, and that which—though seemingly absent—continues to shape the present. We particularly appreciated that our guest introduced us to the context of New York City, with its entangled memories of Indigenous and Black communities, erased from the white history.

Is there a mathematical formula for the most cohesive territorial shape a state can have? In the Czech literary magazine “Tvar”, our PI, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, explores this very question in her essay on postwar Polish efforts to conceptualize such a model.

The whole issue of the magazine, titled The Polish Ends of the World, is devoted to recent Polish literary attempts to answer the question about geographical and cultural scope of Poland as Central European state. Karolina engages with this theme as well, and mentions the work we are doing within the Spectral Recycling project!

A link to the full text you can find here.

The blog post was written by Angelika Zanki, research facilitator and manager in Spectral Recycling grant.

What do fingerprints, migration and Jacques Derrida have in common?

Starting with the invention of fingerprint identification by Juan Vucetich’s, Sherlock Holmes from Hvar, Angelika moves into a haunting reflection on Croatian emigration to South America, inspired by Derrida’s concept of hauntology.

The homeland appears here as a specter – geographically absent, yet powerfully present through language, rituals, music, religion, and religion in the collective memory of a diaspora. How do diaspora communities sustain an imagined Croatia that shapes everyday life and can even mobilize political action, especially in moments of crisis like the war of the 1990s?

This is a story about how the past returns, not as something fully present, but as a force that still acts, insists, and shapes the present.

Link to the blog post you can find here.