CIMS -- Metamodern Memory: On Blade Runner, Then and Now

The Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute (CIMS) invites you to the talk ‘Metamodern Memory: On Blade Runner, Then and Now' by Global Fellow, Professor Alison Landsberg (George Mason) and her collaborator Timotheus Vermeulen (Oslo).

The two films that will be discussed are ‘Blade Runner' (Ridley Scott, Director's Cut) and ‘Blade Runner 2049' (Denis Villeneuve).

Alison Landsberg is Professor of History and Cultural Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the author of ‘Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge' (Columbia UP, 2015) and ‘Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture' (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

She is currently working on a project called ‘Post-Postracial America', which examines the contemporary eruption of discourse about race on both the political left and the right in the mass-mediated public sphere. Taken together, her body of research on museums, film, and television has focused on the modes of engagement they solicit from individuals and the possibilities therein for the production and acquisition of memory, historical knowledge, and political subjectivity in the public sphere.