David Kieran

I am entering my sixth year in the American Studies Department at GW. My dissertation, “‘Sundered By a Memory:’ The Legacy of Vietnam and the Cultural Memory of Trauma in the United States,” examines how the discourses and representational strategies that have been central to the cultural memory of the Vietnam War have come to dominate American memorial practice and how, in turn, other sites of memory have become places where Americans negotiate the complex legacy of Vietnam with regard to discourses of citizenship, militarism, and foreign policy. I examine literary texts, films, political rhetoric, and public memorial practices that have been central to remembering four sites that have not been traditionally associated with Vietnam – the Second World War, the Alamo, the 1993 Somalia intervention, and the crash of Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 – in order to make two key interventions. First, I argue that the legacy of Vietnam continues to define the terrain of memorial practice in American culture, and that contemporary sites of memory must consistently recall and revise the ways of remembering that emerged to negotiate Vietnam’s traumatic legacy. Second, I argue for a greater need to historicize how practices of cultural memory intersect with previous acts of remembrance.

I have presented my work at conferences including the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, the American Studies Association of Turkey Annual Conference, The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting, the Midwestern Modern Language Association Annual Conference, and the Society for the Study of the Korean War Annual Conference. I have published an article in M/MLA: The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association and book reviews in American Studies International and H-1960s, a discussion list-serve for scholars of the 1960s. This fall, I will be submitting an article based on my research at the Flight 93 National Memorial that examines how the public memory of Flight 93 revises the memorial practices familiar from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in order to produce a discourse that supports an interventionist foreign policy.

I have had the great fortune to design and teach two courses at GW. The first, “The Sixties,” examined the cultural history of the 1960s and the enduring significance of “the sixties” in contemporary American culture through close analysis of fiction, memoir, film, political rhetoric, and other forms of cultural production. “Trauma and Memory in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Literature and Culture,” examined memoir, fiction, drama, poetry, film, and visual culture related to lynching, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the 9/11 attacks in order to interrogate questions about how Americans have represented traumatic events and what is at stake in those representations with regard to discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. Before teaching my own classes, I was a research assistant to Dr. James Horton and Dr. Suleiman Osman in the American Studies Department and in the cultural history department of the National Museum of American History, where I worked on the exhibit Separate is Not Equal: Brown vs. Board of Education. I have also taught at other institutions in the Washington area, such as Montgomery College and the Lutheran College Washington Semester, and I began my career as a high school English teacher in Ledyard, Connecticut.

kieran@gwu.edu