Centers in Istanbul and Amman to Host Global Think-Ins

April 03, 2015

Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought is going on the road again this month, taking its Global Think-Ins to Istanbul and Amman to extend the conversation about the national and international political tensions in public memory.

The Think-In series is part of the committee’s project The Politics of Memory in Global Context, now in its fifth year led by historian Carol Gluck, Columbia’s George Sansom Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. The events in Istanbul and Amman follow the first international Think-In the committee held in Paris in January at Columbia Global Centers | Europe, “Remembering Across Time: Psychological Studies of the Two World Wars in Transgenerational Memory.”

The project is a Franco-American collaboration in cooperation with the Global Policy Initiative. Historian Denis Peschanski, of the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Paris I, is the director in France.

Gluck says the aim of the ongoing conversations is to bring together scholars in the social sciences and humanities, neuroscientists and psychologists, and curators of historical and memorial museums to explore the relation between individual and collective remembering and the politics of national and transnational memory in the world today.

“Working together,” she says, “social science and neuroscience can untangle interpretive knots that neither can do on its own, especially in regard to the relation between individual and collective memory.”