This talk examines recent cultural productions that address intersections between memory, ecology, and temporality. Szurmuk is especially interested in highlighting the creation of hospitable archives in different formats and diverse creative languages, some of them by artists and writers, others produced in the context of a research-intervention project that took place in high schools in the early 2020s. She is guided by the following questions: Can the participation of local community actors inspire new questions about the past in dedicated memory spaces? How can conceptions of space and memory be redefined in new iterations of the continuum between past, present, and future? How do new generations frame memorial disputes? How can communal interventions in memorial disputes create new meanings about community territories? 

Mónica Szurmuk is Senior Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and a Professor of Latin American Literature at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is the author of Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives, La vocación desmesurada: Una biografía de Alberto Gerchunoff and Malmö: Una historia argentina. She has coedited Mujeres en viaje, Memoria y ciudadanía, Dictionary of Latin American Studies, Sitios de la memoria: México Post ´68, The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature, Entre mundos y lenguas: las cartas de un maestro de la Alliance Israélite Universelle, Latin American Literature in Transition 1980-2017 and A History of Argentine Literature. She is the editor of the series “Latin American Literature in Transition” for Cambridge University Press. She has recently held the Chaîre des Amériques at the Université de Rennes, a visiting professorship at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, and the De Fortabat Visiting Scholarship at the Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. She is the lead investigator of the collective research-intervention project Intimate Cartographies in Community, which seeks to develop alternative, localized experiences of memory, trauma, and community in marginalized suburbs of Buenos Aires. Szurmuk has received funding from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies of Mexico, Conaculta (Mexico), the American Association of University Women, Global Challenges Research Fund (UK) and UC-Mexus.