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.

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.

Building on our interest in memory, materiality, and transformation, we decided to revisit two canonical texts of memory studies by reading and discussing Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting” alongside the opening chapter of Kenneth Foote’s “Shadowed Ground.” Both texts propose analytical typologies that proved productive for thinking through the dynamics of forgetting, reuse, and normalization that are central to our research.

A significant part of the discussion focused on the usefulness and limitations of typology as an analytical tool. Connerton’s attempt to systematize forms of forgetting is a classic contribution that invites critique as much as application. Foote’s work, grounded in empirical observation of sites of violence in the United States, offered us a more spatial and practice-oriented framework, prompting debate about the transferability of his categories beyond the American context. We wondered if typologies created to embrace sites of memory are useful for intimate objects that are at the center of our interest.

We also explored how both texts intersect with our ongoing interest in recycling, reuse, and transformation. Foote’s notions of obliteration and rectification prompted discussion about different ways of dealing with sites of violence, and about whether some of these modes we can understand as forms of recycling. This, in turn, led us to reflect on the kinds of effort, recognition, and indifference that such practices involve.

Finally, we connected the readings to our own fieldwork, testing Connerton’s and Foote’s categories against concrete examples from European contexts. These discussions reinforced our shared sense that typologies function less as closed systems than as points of departure. They are useful for thinking with, but always in need of revision when confronted with specific historical and spatial conditions.

In the early 19th century, some thinkers dreamed of uniting all Slavs… or at least federating them. Panslavism, as this intellectual and political current was called, was a bold attempt. However, along the way, it encountered many obstacles, both internal and external. In episode 104 of Czechostacja, a podcast hosted by Jakub Medek, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska talks about the history of panslavism and Czech entanglements with it, Russia’s role in these ideas, Polish and Slovak perspectives, and why many believers quickly lost their illusions. She also examines what remains of Slavic unity today—in a world shaped by war and modern nation-states.

Link to the podcast you can find here.