Dr. Taylor Andrew McConnell, FB 05 - Philosophie und Philologie
I participated in a one-week Erasmus+ guest lectureship in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka in Croatia. As Erasmus+ departmental coordinator in Mainz, I took the initiative to establish this partnership in the 2023 summer semester with my Rijeka colleague, Prof. Vjeran Pavlaković, whose work heavily inspired my own doctoral research. In Rijeka, I gave lectures in three courses and took 11 MA students in the course "Cultural Memory and Digital Humanities" on an excursion through Trsat, the neighborhood around the university campus, to see various memorial sites. These included three monuments to the soldiers who died in the course of the Croatian War of Independence/Homeland War, two monuments to Yugoslav Partisan fighters and civilian victims of the Second World War, and two religious monuments in a nearby monastery. In the lecture the following day, we discussed my concept of the "public face of memory" and the individual meanings and contexts of the monuments we had visited, tying in a discussion of digital methods of collecting and analyzing visual data. I also gave a lecture to first-semester students in "Introduction to Cultural History" on memory abuse, another concept that I developed in the course of my doctoral research. My final presentation was for fifth-semester undergraduates in the course "Cultural Policies," where I discussed various opportunities for continued education and academic work in Germany. Overall, this was an incredibly enriching experience that helped both with my pedagogy and my own research, as I managed to document another 50+ monuments that I had overlooked during my PhD. It was invaluable to have the opportunity to present my work to budding memory scholars and to find ways to continue constructive dialogue with my colleagues in Croatia and their students. An Erasmus+ guest lectureship is an experience I wholeheartedly recommend to every lecturer in Mainz.