An article by Assistant Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner appears in Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature, edited by Bettina Reitz-Joosse, Marian W. Makins, and C. J. Mackie, and published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Weiner said the essay, “Mutable Monuments and Mutable Memories in Lucan’s Bellum Civile and the Former Yugoslavia,” provides a forward-looking coda to the volume. It is part of a section on “Memory in War Landscapes.”
The article discusses monuments as volatile sites of collective memory, pairing depictions of monuments and ruins in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (“The Civil War,” a Latin epic poem of the first century CE) alongside a set of spomeniks (a Serbo-Croatian word for “monuments”) erected by Tito to commemorate the sites of World War II battles, civil war atrocities, and concentration camps in Yugoslavia.
Weiner’s exploration of these modern monuments draws heavily on the art of Jan Kempenaers, a Belgian photographer who graciously permitted Weiner to include images of his photographs.
The book chapter develops a lecture Weiner delivered at Université de Montréal in 2017. He has also presented talks on the topic at other colleges and universities in the US, Canada, and New Zealand.
