Interview with Marci
Shore, Associate Professor of History at Yale University. The
interview was conducted in Ithaca, NY on April 10, 2015. To access an mp3 of
the complete interview, click here.
Marci Shore specializes
in European—and especially East-Central European—cultural and intellectual
history is the author of 2 books, including Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’sLife and Death in
Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale, 2006)
and The Taste ofAshes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in
Eastern Europe (2013). She has
also translated Michał Głowiński’s
Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons, from the Polish (that book was
published in 2005). In addition, she has written a number of articles for
both academic and more general readership audiences, including Kritika, Contemporary
European History, and Modern European Intellectual History. She is
currently at work on two book manuscripts, one is entitled “Phenomenological
Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” and the other is an intellectual
history of the recent revolution in Ukraine.
Interview Themes
How Shore came to be
interested in history, people who influenced her, and the “susceptibility to
being transported” (1:48)
How Shore came to be
aware that she was living history in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and the
“un-grounded” and “up-in-the-air” feel of that time (8:08)
What did people like
Shore, who came of age intellectually in the 1990s, see or miss when compared
with those who came before or those who came after? (11:58)
How Shore approaches
writing: principles and idols (on “keeping the language fresh” and “setting the
scene” as opposed to “telling the reader what to think”) (16:58)
On empathizing with the
subjects of one’s work (25:20)
On what holds Shore’s
body of work together: dynamics of generation, friendship (32:40)
Going to Eastern Europe
to seek meaning: how does one arrive at the fundamental questions? (39:15)
Is there an identifiable
“Naimark school” of those who studied under Norman Naimark (45:35)
What is at stake in
considering oneself of an intellectual historian who focuses on a particular
region? (51:05)
Is Eastern Europe
becoming “real” again through events in Ukraine and on the Maidan? On the
“return of metaphysics” and knowing that—for better or worse—“anything is
possible.” (57:25)
Shore on the
“miraculous transformation of subjectivity” in Ukraine (1:05:28)
How should we be
training the next generation of scholars in the field? (1:09:00)
