Memory Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

In I Do Know Some Things, the poet proposes an “encyclopedia of self”

February 13, 2026 • by Rayna Salam

“Who you are and who you think you are: They grind against each other, sand in the frosting,” poet and painter Richard Siken writes in his long-awaited third collection. I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) continues his previous exploration of selfhood, but with a harrowing purpose. In ...

Brick by Brick: Richard Siken Rebuilds His Interior World

Literature

Rabbit Heart

An excerpt from Gina Chung’s short story collection, Green Frog

May 13, 2025 • by Gina Chung

When I am eight years old, I am a girl who would rather hide than seek, a girl who fears bullies and teachers and loud noises and speaking in public and God. I am overweight for my age group, friendless, and known for thick glasses and dark overalls, which I ...

Literature

When Is It Time to Leave?

In her new novel, Overstaying, Ariane Koch plays with the comforts of home

January 30, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

The places we’ve lived are sites of memory, places we can revisit time and again without using a door. I’ve often gone back and visited the home I grew up in, though I haven’t set foot inside since my family left it three decades ago. Instead, I can feel the ...

Multi-Verse

Philip Metres’s Nostalgia

Episode 15: “Here I am, in midlife, thinking about what is home—and knowing that all homes are sandcastles, in a way”

July 2, 2024 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

An oasis, as poet Philip Metres points out in Episode 15, is evanescent by nature. There, and then not there. What does it mean to seek refuge when the oasis is impermanent?...

Memory

Archiving My Life Through Playlists

Feeling and remembering with music

May 22, 2024 • by Robert Noble

In so far as they are imbued with such emotion, playlists quickly become vignettes of pivotal moments. ...

Body & Mind

Forget This Book

In The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez elegizes what we don’t remember

March 11, 2024 • by Chloe Cheimets

Whether we remember them or not, the details of life still drive our lingering emotions. ...

COVID-19

Science and the COVID Epidemic in India

“The past as mnemonic and footnote always tempers our sense of innovation in science policy”

May 2, 2023 • by Shiv Visvanathan and Chandrika Parmar

Lockdowns reflect the arbitrariness of the state, an absence of sociological literacy about urban-rural differences, a sense of management as control without the nuances of social science that the diversity of India desperately needs....

History

“Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

An excerpt from American Relics and the Politics of Memory

April 24, 2023 • by Matthew Dennis

Relics’ ability to bridge space could match their facility in transcending time—they are conventionally transportable, sometimes through their fragmentation and multiplication, and their mobility enhances their usefulness to their possessors, who are thus able to deploy their power where they might have the greatest effect....

Multi-Verse

Multi-Verse Episode 5: Amanda Gunn’s Forensic Imagination

Poetic rememberance

October 5, 2022 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In Episode 5 of Multi-Verse, poet Amanda Gunn reads her poem “What You Meant” and discusses its themes of love, grief, and memory with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham. Learn more about Amanda Gunn and her forthcoming debut collection, Things I Didn't Do with This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Multi-Verse is a ...

Gender

The Making of a Girl

New School Alum Melissa Febos uses memoir to understand the startling shame of becoming a woman in the eyes of others in this excerpt of her book Girlhood

October 20, 2021 • by Melissa Febos

"I got my period when I was ten, and I’d been reading Judy Blume books for a while so I knew it was coming," said Tanaïs. "And when it came, I wasn’t prepared for it anymore." A 2011 American Association of University Women (AAUW) school survey shows that early development ...

New York City

The New Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York

The limits of monuments in public remembrance

April 27, 2021 • by Silvana Alvarez Basto

The tensions between public monuments and history frequently orbit the question of “historical faithfulness” or “accuracy.” The controversy surrounding the new women’s rights monument in Central Park is an example of these tensions. Sculpted by Meredith Bergmann, the monument represents suffragettes Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth. ...

The New Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York

North America

After Trump

Towards democracy and social justice

October 23, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

That, of course, is the problem. And the problem is grave. In 2016, we were worried about what Trump’s victory might mean. Now we know that things have become much worse than most of us ever imagined, and not only for us in the United States. Trump has been a revolutionary—he ...