Alison Landsberg
Overview
Alison Landsberg is a professor and scholar at the George Mason University where she is the current director of the Center of Humanities Research. Her work focuses primarily on memory studies, cultural memory and how mass media shapes collective understanding of history. She currently teaches courses ranging from History and Cultural studies to Art History as well as continuing her work in her research based field.
Background
Landsberg completed her P.h.D at the University of Chicago focusing on the ethical and political implications of mass cultural mediations of experiences in personal and collective memory. Her dissertation Prosthetic Memory: The Logics and Politics of Memory in Modern American Culture (1996), laid the framework for her future book publication of a similar title. During her P.h.D studies she continued publishing essays on topics such as American memory, film critical theory and contemporary issues surrounding historic memory and the Holocaust.
Major Contributions
Books
Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (2004)
Her first major book publication arguing the creation of prosthetic memory by a process of collective or individual acceptance of external experiences and emotion.
Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (2015)
Landsberg’s most recent book publication focuses on an examination of the making and meaning of history for everyday modern media audiences. With this text she explores the ways in which contemporary media encourages complex interactions with the past resulting in historical and political complications.
Essays
Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner” (1995)
In this essay Landsberg explores the relationship between the films Total Recall (1990) and Blade Runner (1982) to introduce her concept of Prosthetic Memory. Her dialectical analysis of the texts reveal the ways in which audiences and individuals acquire memories through processes of mass media consumption, arguing for their equal status in the collection of experiential memory.
Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification (2009)
Following her main research on prosthetic memories, Landsberg explores the ethical and political dimensions of their creation focusing on their dissemination in cinematic mediums. She argues that the technical elements of filmmaking and cinema technology are effective ways of transmitting the elements that create prosthetic memories. With this essay Landsberg explores different filmmaking strategies and approaches that affect impact in different audiences, reaching emotional particularities between differences.
Waking the Deadwood of History: Listening, Language, and the ‘Aural Visceral’ (2010)
The essay follows a more intricate exploration of the ability of the auditory to shape historical experience and create a deeper emotional memory.
Cinematic Temporality: Modernity, Memory and the Nearness of the Past” (2012)
Explores the ability for cinematic forms to collapse constructed notions of time bringing the past into the understanding and enjoyment in the present. Argues for historical films as a way for renditions of the past to impact present memories and emotions.
Key Terms
Prosthetic Memory
Key term coined by Landsberg and the main theme in most of her work. Describes the ways in which individuals acquire memories through means of mass cultural dispersal. These technologies and mediums such as movies, television, museums etc have the ability to give individuals experiences that they have not personally lived, through a heavily emotional shaping of their identity.
Aural-Visceral Memory
The embodied, bodily effect of sounds. Specifically how listening creates a visceral, emotional relationship to the past. Look at the auditory experience more as a physical rather than cognitive process through the sensorial experience of history.
Inter-temporality
A concept which describes the existence of multiple temporalities in a single media experience. The idea that media creates collisions in how time is perceived, where the past, present and future are combined. Used to discuss socio-political and cultural themes within artistic texts.
Sources
- Alison Landsberg. Cultural Studies. (n.d.). https://culturalstudies.gmu.edu/people/alandsb1
- Landsberg, A. (2009). Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 22(2), 221–229. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40608227
- Landsberg, A. (2010). Waking the Deadwood of history: Listening, language, and the ‘aural visceral.’ Rethinking History, 14(4), 531–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2010.515808
- Landsberg, A. (2012). Cinematic Temporality: Modernity, Memory and the Nearness of the Past. In: Keightley, E. (eds) Time, Media and Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
- Prosthetic memory. Columbia University Press. (2025, March 25). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/prosthetic-memory/9780231129275/
- Tybjerg, C. (2016, March 10). Refusing the reality pill: A film studies perspective on prosthetic memory. Kosmorama. https://www.kosmorama.org/en/kosmorama/artikler/refusing-reality-pill-film-studies-perspective-prosthetic-memory