Simpson shines a light on the Iraqi War Memorial Project

The renowned cultural theorist and scholar of Romantic literature, Professor David Simpson, visited UCT in September this year, as a guest of the Archive and Public Culture research initiative.

During his time in Cape Town, he delivered a public lecture in the APC seminar series devoted to the cultural and political dynamics of the Iraqi War Memorial Project www.iraqimemorial.org. This project aimedto honor and commemorate the deaths of thousands of civilians killed since the commencement of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ on March 19, 2003 by establishing an Internet archive as a living memorial that serves as a repository of memorial concepts.

‘The idea was to support the moral imperative of recognising the deaths of Iraqi civilians by creating a context for the initiation of a process of symbolic, creative atonement,’ said Simpson.The projectsought to mobilise an international community of artists to contribute proposals that would represent a collective expression of memory, unity and peace; to encourage the vigilance of contemporary memory in a time of war and to stimulate an understanding of the consequences and costs of ‘the war on terror’.

Simpson is currently the GB Needham Endowed Chair in English at UC Davis in California, where he has taught since 1997. Previous appointments were at Columbia University in New York, University of Colorado, Northwestern University, and the University of Cambridge. His main areas of research and teaching are Romanticism and literary theory and he is a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, and of Modern Language Quarterly.

Simpson is the author of numerous books, including The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Situatedness; or Why we Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (Duke University Press, 2002), 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

The APC reading group devoted some sessions to his study 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. In addition to his lecture on the Iraqi War Memorial Project, Simpson also gave two other papers during his stay; The Figure of the Stranger in Coleridge and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Culture of 9/11.