Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade

"Nelson and Olin have brought together a rich group of essays of exceedingly high quality. There are many books on monuments and memory, but no other book probes the notion of the monument in the exhaustive way this book does. None has a comparable chronological, global, and imaginative range, or its intellectual and methodological diversity."--Michele H. Bogart, author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York "Canadian Literature" Nelson and Olin have collected an extraordinarily eclectic range of papers--on everything from early modern travel journals to the markers of nuclear waste sites, from nationalist conflicts in India to Roland Barthes and the temporality of photography." --Charles Barbour "Canadian Literature" "Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is a provocative collection of essays that explore the social meaning and cultural function of images. As many of the authors testify, monuments do not reflect their past so much as they work to create memory in the present. Particularly valuable and timely is Nelson's and Olin's inclusion of studies that analyze the significance of monuments, sometimes destroyed, in different cultures. --Michael Ann Holly, author of The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects "Canadian Literature"

Robert S. Nelson is a Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the History of Culture, and chair of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw and coeditor of Critical Terms for Art History, second edition, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press. Margaret Olin is a professor of art history, theory, and criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art.