Marianne Hirsch
| Marianne Hirsch | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 23, 1949 Timișoara, Romania |
| Occupation | writer, professor |
| Spouse | Leo Spitzer |
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 fled Czernowitz, Hirsch immigrated to the United States in 1962. She completed her BA/MA 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 been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the ACLS, 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 since been expanded 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."
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