Historian Carol Gluck to Discuss War and Memory October 28

Carol Gluck, one of America's preeminent historians of modern Japan and George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University, will deliver this year's John Lax Memorial Lecture Thursday, October 28, at 4:15 pm in the New York Room in Mary Woolley Hall. Her topic will be "Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century." The lecture will be followed by a reception.

In this lecture, Gluck expands her study of historical memory in Japan to include all the peoples and nations affected by World War II. Presenting her current book project, she will deal with the problem of remembering the war, in contrast to studying or narrating its events. In Germany, Japan, the United States, Russia, and elsewhere, the process of remembering has become a political, intellectual, and emotional flashpoint for millions of people, including many who are too young to have experienced the war.

Gluck has written many books and articles about the emergence of Japan as a modern nation and empire, and she has trained a generation of graduate students to study this complex, often painful history. Her book Japan's Modern Myths has set the standard for analyzing the intellectual and ideological construction of a nation-state from the remains of the feudal, fragmented, and intellectually divided Tokugawa Shogunate. She has also edited several collections, including Asia in Western and World History and Showa: The Japan of Hirohito, that are of great use to history teachers as well as academic scholars.

The John Lax Memorial Lecture was endowed in 1982 by professors Peter and the late Anneli Lax of New York University's mathematics department, in memory of their son, John, an historian who taught at Mount Holyoke in the mid-1970s. After John Lax was killed in an automobile accident, his parents created a permanent memorial in the form of this annual lecture. The Lax Lecture is given by an historian of the highest distinction to commemorate the work and spirit of John Lax by making the latest advances in history accessible to the public. Past Lax Lecturers have included Fritz Stern, C. Vann Woodward, Jonathan Spence, Gerda Lerner, Eric Hobsbawm, Natalie Z. Davis, and William McFeely.