This presentation considers the role of public communication—media, memorial, heritage culture, and local public history—in claiming closure for contentious past events even while they are still in living memory, and, conversely, in resuscitating a sense of living memory of events no living person can actually remember. Drawing on recent scholarship about “citizen witnessing,” empathy, and historical imagination, this project explores the complex nature of public memory that is increasingly multimediated and yet also increasingly place-based, attentive to material culture, and intent on fostering individualized connections with the past. These ideas will be explored with specific examples from the United States and the United Kingdom, including new public interpretations of the September 11th attacks, Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” and the First World War.

Kitch is a Professor of Journalism in the School of Media and Communication. She has published four books: The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media; Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines; Journalism in a Culture of Grief, co-authored with Janice Hume; and Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past.