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[VIRTUAL] Scholars@Hallwalls: Meredith Conti, “Haunting the Stage: Dark Tourism, Lieux de Mémoire, and the Immortal Death of Abraham Lincoln at Washington D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre” [OVPRED/HI Public Humanities Faculty Fellow]
May 1, 2020 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Meredith Conti, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance; and 2019-20 OVPRED/HI Public Humanities Faculty Fellow. Photographer: Douglas Levere
Join us for a virtual edition of our Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community.
Meredith Conti’s presentation is available to view online as a video, provided in two parts. Click through the links below to watch the videos in advance of Friday’s live Q&A session:
On Friday, May 1 at 4:00 pm, we will gather for a live Q&A session with Meredith on Zoom. Meeting info is as follows:
Topic: [Virtual] Scholars@Hallwalls: Meredith Conti Live Q&A
Time: May 1, 2020 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://buffalo.zoom.us/j/97794816454?pwd=VnZjL01JZlg0WUpHcWVTQWRZMjI3QT09
Meeting ID: 977 9481 6454
Password: 074823
One of the most popular tourist destinations in Washington, D.C. is a historic crime scene. Ford’s Theatre, the location of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, both typifies and complicates Pierre Nora’s notion of lieu de mémoire, a site of memory. Simultaneously operating as a history classroom, a patriotic pilgrimage site, and a dark tourism hotspot, Ford’s Theatre contains three interactive lieux de mémoire—a cluster of historic buildings, a museum installation, and a working theatre—all of which continuously reconstruct the site’s legendary past while keeping time with the ever-evolving present. Drawing upon the work of Nora and Marvin Carlson, as well as performance studies scholarship on dark tourism and living history museums, Meredith Conti considers the many macabre stagings that haunt Ford’s Theatre (onstage, in the museum, on the streets outside), including the fateful, interrupted 1865 production of Our American Cousin. As a lieu de mémoire and a multimodal theatre of the macabre, Ford’s Theatre’s continuous reproductions of Lincoln’s death serve to guarantee his immortality.
Meredith is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and culture in the United States and Britain. Her research variously explores the intersections of theatre and medicine; popular entertainment forms (minstrelsy, world fairs, music hall, etc.); gender and race in the Victorian period; and gun violence in theatre. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine, and is working on her second monograph entitled Gunpowder Plots: A Cultural History of Firearms and the U.S. American Theatre, for which she has received fellowships and grants awarded by UB’s Gender Institute, UB’s Humanities Institute, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.
