abstract: Many contemporary artists have turned to the past in order to negotiate and make sense of their relationship with the present. Similarly, museums have begun to look back in order to push forward and through a revisionist lens they scrutinize their collections and reveal ignored object histories. A prominent method some museums implement is allowing contemporary artists to comb through the vaults and present new relationships between their objects to their visitors. Through a psychological analysis of memory, and theorists’ dissection of nostalgia, object agency, and contemporaneity, I argue that artists Spencer Finch, Do Ho Suh, Newsha Tavakolian, Solmaz Daryani, Malekeh Nayiny, Mitra Tabrizian, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Gala Porras-Kim function as revivalists – or artists whose works use memory and nostalgia to bring the past back to life. By attempting to retrieve memories, create nostalgic experiences, and question histories, they make their works tools for remembrance, reconciliation, and renegotiation with the past and present. The concerns these artists bring to the surface through their works build an understanding of how memory and nostalgia function as devices for personal meaning-making, trauma processing, and human-object relationship building. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2020

This thesis aims to highlight the smock-dress within the context of Soviet-Estonia during the post-war epoch, ca. 1950s until 1990s. Through Mauss’s socio-anthropological tripoint view, the concepts and identities of the smock-dress are studied from the angles of biology, sociology and psychology. The intention is to show its widespread use amongst Soviet- Estonian women and their remembrance of it, in accordance with the Soviet ideological structures. Using semi-structured interviews, I have assembled oral history from women who attain this historical retrospective, aiming to depict the smock-dress as both a concept and an object, thus functioning as an emblem of Soviet society rather than a historical artefact. Relying on the terms nostalgia, socio-cultural belonging and phenomenology, I seek to capture the smock-dress as both a vestiary phenomenon and representation of social structures. Thus, creating a dual identity, individual and collective, through its usage, showing that sartorial fashion encompasses more than just emotions and promoted stylistics.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Union Station is a unique historic building in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. The station, which first opened in 1853, has connected the history of the evolution of travel and the city of Indianapolis and, in the late twentieth century, became deeply embedded in local conversations about national issues at the intersection of race, historic preservation, and urban renewal. The station was a place of Black exclusion from public spaces throughout its existence, first as a train station, and later when it was repurposed as a Festival Marketplace. In preparation for the opening of the Festival Marketplace in the 1980s—complete with shops, restaurants, and a hotel—the developers invited people to write to them to preserve personal memories of experiences at the station from the era of train travel. Indiana residents, both white and Black, as well as Indianapolis city officials, and redevelopers of the station showed nostalgia for earlier eras when the station was active. This nostalgia, I argue, played an active and productive role in the process of saving Union Station. Importantly, those who contributed a letter to the “Remember Union Station” project were overwhelmingly white. Out of eighty-six letters, the race of seventy-three of them can be confirmed. Of those eighty-six, only two have been identified as Black. The two Black letter writers used the opportunity to contribute to the “Remember Union Station” campaign as a means to remember and claim the right to belong in Union Station for themselves, their families, and Black communities. As this project shows, the Indianapolis Union Station has always been more than just a building. It is a space that captures a part of the complex history of the city of Indianapolis and can hopefully provide more links to the past, present, and future for Hoosiers and visitors alike.

The thesis attempts to present a comparative reading of selected works by Egon Hostovský with an emphasis on the poetics associated with the themes of memory and recollection. Attention is focused mainly on the role that the memory of the protagonists plays in the constitution of the narrating subject and other characters of the literary piece, on the relationship between memories and fiction (i. e. memory and imagination) and on the origin and function of sentimental or nostalgic motives that emerge in this context. The core of the thesis consists of reading Hostovský's works written between 1930s and 1940s. Key words: Egon Hostovský, memory, recollection, narrative identity, fiction, nostalgia

This thesis is based on my stay at a retro "ROH recreation - holidays in Tatras as 'then'" organized and provided by one Czech travel agency whose major customers are elderly people. The thesis focuses especially on the motivation of these people to buy such a product, and describes how they spend a holiday like that. This detailed description is an extremely important starting point for clarifying the phenomenon known as nostalgia, which is also in relation to post-communist countries referred to as 'ostalgia". Using the concepts of social memory I show that next to the officially accepted version of history there is a large number of alternative and often contradictory "memories" based on small personal histories of everyday life, which do not include Communism as a political system, but "ordinary" life in the communist times. The main goal of my thesis is to try to find the answers to the question, whether that what the older generation misses is really the communist regime itself, or the sentence "it was better under communism" hides something completely different from mere identification with a particular political establishment. Key words: ROH recreation; communism; retro; nostalgia; social memory; habitus

Who is the nostalgia-prone person? The 'sociality view' sees an individual who frequently recalls meaningful memories rich in social content. The 'maladaptation view' sees an emotionally unstable, neurotic individual. In four studies, we integrated these contrasting views. We hypothesized that the link between neuroticism and nostalgia proneness arises because (a) neuroticism is associated with the need to belong and (b) the need to belong triggers nostalgia, with its abundant social content. Consistent with this hypothesis, Studies 1-2 found that the correlation between neuroticism and nostalgia proneness was eliminated when controlling for the need to belong. The need to belong predicted increased nostalgia proneness, above and beyond neuroticism. Specifically, Study 2 revealed that a deficit-reduction (rather than growth) belongingness orientation predicted increased nostalgia proneness. When the role of this deficit-reduction belongingness orientation was controlled, the positive correlation between neuroticism and nostalgia disappeared. Studies 3-4 showed that experimental inductions of a belongingness deficit augmented nostalgia, providing support for its compensatory role.

Who is the nostalgia-prone person? The 'sociality view' sees an individual who frequently recalls meaningful memories rich in social content. The 'maladaptation view' sees an emotionally unstable, neurotic individual. In four studies, we integrated these contrasting views. We hypothesized that the link between neuroticism and nostalgia proneness arises because (a) neuroticism is associated with the need to belong and (b) the need to belong triggers nostalgia, with its abundant social content. Consistent with this hypothesis, Studies 1-2 found that the correlation between neuroticism and nostalgia proneness was eliminated when controlling for the need to belong. The need to belong predicted increased nostalgia proneness, above and beyond neuroticism. Specifically, Study 2 revealed that a deficit-reduction (rather than growth) belongingness orientation predicted increased nostalgia proneness. When the role of this deficit-reduction belongingness orientation was controlled, the positive correlation between neuroticism and nostalgia disappeared. Studies 3-4 showed that experimental inductions of a belongingness deficit augmented nostalgia, providing support for its compensatory role.

Magister Artium - MA / This Creative Writing mini-thesis offers a deep meditation on what it means to speak to ritual and memory. The thesis is compiled from a collection of original creative work as well as a short reflective essay that present a critical analysis of the creative pieces in relation to the ideas I present. The first of these ideas being, memory as an encapsulation of the past, present and future as explored by writers such as W.G. Sebald and Toni Morrison. This collection examines an understanding of memory and ritual as being uncontained, as constant providers of stimulation for a range of literary responses. Ritual will be regarded primarily in the South African context where there is the intersection of the urban and rural landscapes both physically and metaphorically. In this regard I am thinking alongside writers such as Louise Glúck and Vangile Gantsho. The understanding of ritual is extended to the realm of spirituality where Christianity and African spirituality exist both harmoniously and in conflict. In short, the collection of poems and the reflective essay will explore the ways that memory and ritual interact in time and they will collectively contribute to the production of literature in South Africa.

This thesis aims to highlight the smock-dress within the context of Soviet-Estonia during the post-war epoch, ca. 1950s until 1990s. Through Mauss’s socio-anthropological tripoint view, the concepts and identities of the smock-dress are studied from the angles of biology, sociology and psychology. The intention is to show its widespread use amongst Soviet- Estonian women and their remembrance of it, in accordance with the Soviet ideological structures. Using semi-structured interviews, I have assembled oral history from women who attain this historical retrospective, aiming to depict the smock-dress as both a concept and an object, thus functioning as an emblem of Soviet society rather than a historical artefact. Relying on the terms nostalgia, socio-cultural belonging and phenomenology, I seek to capture the smock-dress as both a vestiary phenomenon and representation of social structures. Thus, creating a dual identity, individual and collective, through its usage, showing that sartorial fashion encompasses more than just emotions and promoted stylistics.

The historic portrayal of the teenage girl in cinema as a mythical, sexual, hyper feminine and contemporary creature makes way for a specific but fairly common trope. Namely a trope where the teenage girl is used to elicit nostalgia and romance for the male protagonist, specifically because of her trauma and pain. The connection between the youth, femininity, pain and her status as contemporary is what makes the teenage girl an especially nostalgic object. Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is a film that perfectly highlights and exaggerates this trope. By analyzing this film as well as comparing it to earlier examples, this essay will problematize this portrayal and locate its roots. This essay will analyze these examples and compare them to the general portrayal of the teenage girl in cinema during the twentieth century. By looking at The Virgin Suicides through the theory of the male gaze and the female spectacle, Coppola’s highlighting of this trope becomes clear. This essay concludes that it is unclear if Coppola subverts or simply leans into this trope, but it becomes evident that it is a trope built on the fact that pain and deadness is the height of perfect femininity. Perfect femininity in turn can only be achieved during adolescence, and therefore, the trauma of female adolescence becomes nostalgic.