Upper Peninsula 9/11 Oral History Project - Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Attacks - America 250
Academic
The Beaumier U.P. Heritage Center, as part of its America 250 programming, presents an event about the Upper Peninsula 9/11 Oral History Project with Anna Zimmer on Wednesday, August 26, 7 p.m. The event will be held in the Atrium of the Lydia M. Olson Library in Harden Hall on the campus of Northern Michigan University. It is free and open to the public. Zimmer, Professor of German Studies and Assistant Director of the Honors Program at Northern Michigan University, will describe how her personal and scholarly journey from Stuttgart to Omaha to Washington, DC to Berlin, and finally to Marquette, led to the development of the Upper Peninsula 9/11 Oral History Project.
While much has been written about national and urban responses to 9/11, even 25 years after the attacks, little exists about how rural or midwestern communities experienced that day and its aftermath. The UP 9/11 Oral History Project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Zimmer’s Honors Program students, aims to address that gap by foregrounding regional memory, especially as shaped by geographical isolation, local institutions, and the UP’s Cold War military legacy.
Dr. Zimmer’s research focuses primarily on twenty-first-century German-language literature and explores how authors employ literary representations of World War II memory to narrate memories of post-1990 violent conflicts and wars. Reflecting upon the broader contours of her scholarship and the America250MI guiding themes of “unfinished revolutions,” “power of place,” and “doing history,” Dr. Zimmer’s presentation will situate the UP 9/11 Oral History Project within global and local memory discourses.
