Conor Lauesen
I am currently a second year student in the History Department. My work focuses on spaces, memories, and sites of contestation during moments of trauma and tragedy; specifically I am trying to address these moments of spiral in Vietnam and America. Understanding history as an approximation of contact with a past that breathes most palpably through the historian’s persistent decoding of moments, events, soundscapes, and images embeds the work with a fundamental commitment to both aesthetics and phenomenology. As of late, I am particularly interested in the triangulation of histories in distanced temporalities, spaces and modes of text. Ideas of communication, legibility and thresholds, seem to have voice here. These specific interests include 19th and 20th Century Vietnamese histories, the American Civil War, the ruins of place, imagination and memory in sculpting the past, and visual/aural culture more broadly. I am currently working on two projects: one essay looks at American sensibilities in relation to the Hindenburg’s transatlantic flights and eventual disaster in flames; the other paper compares the tactility of memorialization, monumentation and museum constructions at both Auschwitz and Tuol Sleng.
