Skip to content

SAC presents: Mark Whittaker

341 Eggers Hall

Add to: Outlook, ICal, Google Calendar

Collective trauma, historical memories and the refashioning of national narratives: responses of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora to the defeat of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Whitaker will discuss the current struggle within the Tamil Diaspora to envision a new future for their community in the face of this raw historical event. He will show how the people he talked to used an array of available, variously constructed, historical memories – some rooted in Sri Lanka’s landscape and its past tragedies, some forged in Diaspora and within its media saturated civic spaces -- to come to grips with their collective trauma. Mark Whitaker is a Professor of Anthropology, and holds a Chair in Social and Behavioral Science, at the University of South Carolina, Aiken; he is also an adjunct Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. His work focuses on politics, religion, nationalism, journalism, biography, and new media technologies among Tamils in Sri Lanka and in their Diaspora. 

Open to

Public

Contact

Accessibility

Contact to request accommodations

Exterior of Maxwell in black and white when there was no Eggers building

We’re Turning 100!


To mark our centennial in the fall of 2024, the Maxwell School will hold special events and engagement opportunities to celebrate the many ways—across disciplines and borders—our community ever strives to, as the Oath says, “transmit this city not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”

Throughout the year leading up to the centennial, engagement opportunities will be held for our diverse, highly accomplished community that now boasts more than 38,500 alumni across the globe.