War, Memory, and Commemoration in the Humanities

FAIN: AV-260596-18

Governors State University (University Park, IL 60484-3165)
Rosemary Erickson Johnsen (Project Director: October 2017 to February 2025)
Andrae Marak (Co Project Director: March 2018 to February 2025)

The training of five student veterans to lead discussions for an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on war and its remembrance and four off-campus public discussions in the region.   

The College of Arts and Sciences in conjunction with the Veterans Resource Center at Governors State University proposes a multi-part project for 2018-19. Co-directors Rosemary Johnsen (Professor of English) and Andrae Marak (Professor of History & Dean) will recruit and train 5 GSU student-veterans to be embedded small-group discussion leaders in a special-topics course featuring multiple literary genres, film, and digital humanities sources. The course focuses on themes of commemoration, particularly recent centenary observations of WWI, and war memory as it impacts veterans. The student-veterans will also participate in a public program on campus, and in the spring they will visit 4 off-campus sites to lead discussions. Exploring the expression of war experience in a range of humanities sources produced by veterans, military veterans and others involved in our program will make new connections among the humanities, themes of war memory and commemoration, and personal worldviews.