Motivating Monuments:
Defining Collective Identities in Public Spaces

A symposium hosted by the graduate students of the history of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh will be held November 2-3, 2018. Dr. Jacqueline Jung will serve as the symposium's keynote speaker.

The goal of this conference is to promote interdisciplinary discussions about the power invested in monuments and how individual attachments to them are persistently and profoundly mediated by shared group identities. This symposium takes objects as concrete manifestation of collective identities and will foster productive, in-depth discussions about the shared stakes of monuments. Conversations will unfold across premodern, early modern, modern, and contemporary topics, thematically linking research that might otherwise be isolated by disciplinary or historical divides.