Talk:
“Between Legacies and Memories: Sedimentation and the Persistence of Meaning”
by
Jeffrey K. Olick
Department of Sociology and History
University of Virginia
jko3k@virginia.edu
Date: Friday, October 16, 2026 Time: 12:30 p.m. Venue: A 130 Seminar Room (FEASS Building)
Abstract
How does the past persist in the present? Social scientists have developed two largely separate vocabularies for answering this question. Research on collective memory emphasizes the symbolic and interpretive processes through which pasts are represented, transmitted, and contested. Research on historical legacies, particularly in political science and historical sociology, focuses instead on the durable effects of past institutions, structures, and events, often independently of whether actors remember or recognize their historical origins. This talk examines the conceptual space between these approaches. It argues that neither memory nor legacy adequately captures an important form of historical persistence: the ways historically constituted meanings and practices become embedded in social life as taken-for-granted background conditions of perception, judgment, and action. The argument is developed in part through the controversy surrounding the 1619 Project, an influential effort to reinterpret American history by placing slavery and its enduring consequences at the center of the national story.
Short Bio
Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia. He is Past President of the Memory Studies Association (memorystudiesassociation.org) and an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. Olick received a B.A. with High Honors from Swarthmore College (1986) and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale (1993), where his dissertation won the Marvin B. Sussman prize. Before joining the faculty at UVa, Olick was a member of the sociology department faculty at Columbia University in New York City for eleven years. Olick is a cultural and historical sociologist whose work has focused on collective memory and commemoration, critical theory, transitional justice, postwar Germany, and sociological theory more generally. Current work focuses on the historical origins of the boundaries between psychology and sociology, the life and work of Maurice Halbwachs, and change in political culture through conflict over collective memory. Olick frequently speaks at universities, conferences, and public forums around the world, and his work has been translated into Spanish, German, Polish, Turkish, Estonian, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.