Marianne Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch (born September 23, 1949) is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Born in Timișoara, Romania, where her parents Carl Hirsch, a Jewish engineer, and Lotte Hirsch, née Gottfried, fled from Czernowitz, Hirsch immigrated to the United States in 1962.

She completed her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Brown University before becoming a professor at Dartmouth College, where she taught for thirty years.

She was also one of the founders of the Women's Studies Program at Dartmouth, and served as Chair of Comparative Literature for a number of years.

Hirsch has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bellagio and Bogliasco Foundations, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, among others.

She is past president of the Modern Language Association, and has served on the MLA Executive Council, the ACLA Advisory Board, the Executive Board of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, and the Board of Supervisors of The English Institute.

She is also on the advisory boards of Memory Studies and Contemporary Women's Writing.

A founder of Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference and its global initiative "Women Creating Change", much of Hirsch's work concerns feminist theory, memory studies, and photography.

In 1992, Hirsch introduced the term "postmemory," a concept that has subsequently been cited in hundreds of books and articles.

The term was originally used primarily to refer to the relationship between the children of Holocaust survivors and the memories of their parents, but has been expanded over time.

Now, the concept has evolved beyond these familial and generational restrictions to describe "the relationship that later generations or distant contemporary witnesses bear to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of others—to experiences they 'remember' or know only by means of stories, images, and behaviors."

Historian Guy Beiner has criticized the extent of the use of the term in Memory Studies and suggested alternative ways in which it can be re-conceptualized as a more challenging analytical category.

Her other books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (University of California Press, 2010), and Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997).

She also co-edited the Summer 2012 issue of e-misférica titled "On the Subject of Archives" with Diana Taylor and a special issue of Signs on "Gender and Cultural Memory" (2002).

In 2015, the Journal of Trauma and Literature Studies has dedicated a special issue to the notion of postmemory.

Hirsch's newest monograph, co-authored with Leo Spitzer, is School Pictures in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (University of Washington Press, 2019).

Edited and co-edited collections include Women Mobilizing Memory, co-edited with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Maria Jose Contreras, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon (Columbia University Press, 2019), Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements With Vernacular Photography, co-edited with Tina Campt, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis (Steidl, 2019), Rites of Return: Diaspora, Poetics and the Politics of Memory, co-edited with Nancy K. Miller (Columbia University Press, 2011), Grace Paley Writing the World (co-ed. 2009), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (co-ed. 2004), Time and the Literary (co-ed. 2002), and The Familial Gaze (ed. 1999).