Lecture: Simone Stirner, “Haunting, Quilting, Melting: Shapes of Queer Memory”
What happens to our understanding of relational memory when viewed through queer histories? In this talk, Stirner examines memory art dedicated to often neglected queer and trans histories after National Socialism, from translucent quilts to an installation that melts a concentration camp gate and rewelds it into new forms. Beyond arguing for the inclusion of queer histories in relational frameworks of remembrance, the talk proposes that attending to the distinct shapes and textures of queer relationality reshapes the concept itself, showing how queer memory practices expand and transform what it means to think memory relationally.
Simone Stirner (Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University) works on poetry and poetics, memory studies, and the intersections of critical and creative practices. Stirner's first book Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism (Fordham University Press, forthcoming) develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: 359. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206-543-3920, humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Workshop with Simone Stirner: "Intertextuality as Relational Memory: Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ in the Poetry of Almadhoun, Clark, Dzukogi”
RSVP required.
Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” is one of the most famous poems to commemorate the Holocaust. Celan himself refused to publicly read the poem in the decades after its publication. But the poem and its key figure of “black milk” also developed their own life, and up until today they reappear in the writings of a range of contemporary poets: Tiana Clark cites it when remembering the history of the Civil War; Ghayath Almadhoun invokes it in the context of the Syrian migration to Europe in the 2010s; and Saddiq Dzukogi turns to Celan’s words in mourning the death of his infant daughter. In this workshop, Stirner discusses the intertextual relations around the figure “black milk,” proposing that they offer a basis for a theory of relational memory. The citational economy around “black milk” provides an understanding of intertextuality as cultural memory that shifts the focus to the ways texts participate in each other’s histories and in a shared structure of feeling of grief.
Simone Stirner…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: 359. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206-543-3920, humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, June 3, 2026, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM.