University of Nottingham

Graduate Student, School of American & Canadian Studies

Thesis Title: Graven Images: American National Funerals 1963-1968

About

My thesis concentrates on American cultural memory as expressed at national funerals in the 1960's.  I am particularly interested in the priviliged role that photography and television have in communicating national identities, with an emphasis on the dialogue that takes place between individuals and the wider imagined national community at these commemorative events. To this effect, I have researched the history of national funerals in America; the relationship between political celebrity, trauma, and national identity; satellite technologies and the global response to American national funerals; and the changing uses and institutional contexts of photographs of national funerals, with a particular emphasis on Paul Fusco's photographs of Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral.

My AHRC funded MRes thesis titled RFK Funeral Train: The Cultural Life of a Memory Text was a case study of Paul Fusco's photobook RFK Funeral Train. Fusco photographed the thousands of people that lined the train tracks to watch Senator Robert Kennedy's coffin as it was transported from New York to Washington. These revealing photographs are a powerful record of the status of Senator Kennedy in the American public conscious at the time of his death. They also indicate how a national community is formed through commemorative events of mourning.

Fusco's photographs have emerged in a variety of contexts and eras; originally published as photojournalistic images in Look Magazine in 1968 they have also formed a travelling exhibition in the late 1990s, been published in numerous editions of a photobook in 1999, 2000 and 2008, and are the basis of a documentary feature titled One Thousand Pictures (2009). I traced the numerous 'lives' of the photos, looking at the changed institutional and cultural contexts of their emergence. The photographs thus provided a specific example of the changing status of an object of cultural memory.

I have since worked as Specialist Researcher on the documentary feature One Thousand Pictures. I located and interviewed a number of the individuals in Fusco's photographs about their recollections of this event. One Thousand Pictures is due to be screened on More 4 in the UK in the 2010 autumn schedule of the acclaimed "True Stories" documentary series; and on HBO in America in early 2011.

I teach film studies at Leicester University and Nottingham University.

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