Directed by Bice Peruzzi and Jeffrey Ulrich
Scholars have understood nostalgia alternately as a pathology (both individual and collective), as an emotion with positive or negative effects, and as a societal phenomenon shaping political and cultural movements. The seventeenth-century Swiss physician who named the condition was trying to account for the psychic and somatic effects of modern warfare; he took his etymological coordinates from Homer, who famously meditates on Odysseus’ “pain” (algia) over his “journey home” (nostos). Even in its origins, then, the term has named a vague affliction, encoded a range of meanings for the idea of “going home,” and summoned a set of powerful ideas about the relations of modernity and antiquity. The concept is no less conflicted today. In many cases, nostalgia has functioned as a powerful tool of collective memory manipulation in the wake of population displacement or the destruction wrought by armed conflict. Meanwhile, in some branches of empirical psychology nostalgia has been reframed as a positive, “future-oriented” emotion correlated with increased optimism, inspiration, and general social efficacy in individuals.
Our seminar aims to approach these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. Can nostalgia be defined, and how does it function both in the past and in our current cultural moment? How is it evoked in literary, artistic, and cultural representations? Can societal nostalgia be a good thing, since people derive part of their group identity from shared remembrance? What is the relationship between nostalgia and partial, fragmentary, or reconstructed memory? We invite scholars from a range of fields, including but not limited to psychology of memory, social memory, cognitive science, neurology, cultural preservation studies, literature, environmental studies, rhetoric and propaganda studies. Our goal is to develop a broader heuristic framework to identify and critically account for a protean concept with a powerful history and a key role in contemporary society.
In addition to two post-doctoral fellows, the 2027-28 seminar will include Rutgers faculty and graduate students. Information on how to apply for seminar membership will be posted here soon.