An Offering - Meditations with Walter Benjamin

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Emily Brennan-Moran is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on memory, performance, and haunting — particularly the ways in which we name the dead in commemorative contexts.

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Della Pollock, whose dedication to my scholarship made this project possible, and Ann Weiss, for her steadfast support and her commitment to the photographs in The Last Album. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my partner, Kevin Moran, whose assistance in coding the web interface for this project was invaluable. Finally, my thanks to Eduardo Cadava and the participants in the seminar Genealogies of Memory and Perception: Literature and Photography at the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, Summer 2018. The seminar’s collective meditation on photography pushed my own meditation on Minka’s photograph to its finished-for-now state.

Minka’s photograph courtesy of Ann Weiss
From The Last Album
For further information see http://thelastalbum.org/content/