Julia Creet | York University (original) (raw)
Books by Julia Creet
The Genealogical Sublime, 2020
Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry... more Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.
In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world’s genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.
Watch a 30 minute summary of the book: https://youtu.be/9fkJdgLgXxw
H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to t... more H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to the life and work of German-language author H. G. Adler. Among the international scholars of German, Jewish, and Holocaust literature and history who reveal the range of Adler’s legacy across genres are Adler’s son, Jeremy Adler, and Peter Filkins, translator of Adler’s trilogy, The Journey, Panorama and The Wall. Together, the essays examine Adler's writing in relation to his life, especially his memory as a survivor of the Nazi death camps and his posthumous recognition for having produced a Gesamt-kunstwerk, an aesthetic synthesis of the Shoah. The book carries the moral charge of Adler's work, moving beyond testimony to a complex dialectic between fact and fiction, exploring Adler's experiments with voice and the ethical work of literary engagement with the Shoah.
The link between memory and place has historically attended the study of memory in every sense: i... more The link between memory and place has historically attended the study of memory in every sense: in its contents (our attachment to memories of home); in its practices (place as an aid to rote memorization); in its externalizations (monuments and museums); in its linguistic expressions (“I can’t quite place you”); and, in its psychological and physiological theorizations (the conscious and unconscious brain as the loci of memory, firing across well- or little-used synaptic gaps). As Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starns put it, “Proust’s petite Madeleine, Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal work on the ‘social frames’ of collective memory, and even cognitive studies and biological research on the ‘location’ of memory in the brain are all reminders that memory seeks its local habitations.” The contributors to Memory and Migration explore this crucial observation about the locations of memory in relation to a pressing contemporary question: How do we understand memory that has migrated or has been exiled from its local habitations? It would be a simpler question if mobility and distance weren’t generally understood to produce “artificial” memory, or something akin to history. But, in this volume we argue that migration rather than location is the condition of memory. Between times, places, generations and media, from individuals to communities and vice versa, movement is what produces memory—and our anxieties about pinning it to place. How then do we understand the fixity of place in memory, intensified in an age of mass migrations?
Review of Memory and Migration: http://migration.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/13/migration.mns009.short
Documentary Film by Julia Creet
“Data Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family” https://juliacreet.vhx.tv/ M... more “Data Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family”
https://juliacreet.vhx.tv/
More than half of North Americans are fascinated by genealogy and invested in their family histories. The emotional impact is profound. Some gain a sense of identity by uncovering their ancestors, their culture, and their country of origin. Others find it devastating and disorienting when they discover that their history differs from what they have always believed. But there is another side to the rise in genealogy that goes beyond human interest. It is arguably the largest historical enterprise in the world, and one of the largest data mining operations, driven by big religion, big business and big technology. Data Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family explores the industry behind the exponential intensity of genealogy. What are the motivations of the key players and how are their ambitions affecting the millions of North Americans who are searching for answers?
Watch the trailer on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zooJhgP8Gxg
Part literary detective story and part personal journey, MUM is a documentary drawn from Magda Cr... more Part literary detective story and part personal journey, MUM is a documentary drawn from Magda Creet's memoirs, letters and poems, an archive of a holocaust survivor who left a paper trail to her hidden past. The trail leads to Hungary, where local memory reveals the story my mother tried to forget.
Originally streamed from the Archives of Ontario, Sept 21, 2018, 2018
Leading experts explore the science, medical ethics, privacy implications and social meanings of... more Leading experts explore the science, medical ethics, privacy implications and social meanings of the direct-to-consumer genetic genealogy industry. Each video is 20 mins.
1. Land acknowledgement and Opening remarks
2. Susan Young, Professional Genealogist, "Where Genealogy Meets Genetics"
3. Hendrik Poinar, Evolutionary Geneticist, "The Science of Genetic Genealogy"
4. Wendy Roth, Sociologist, "Genetic Genealogy & Racial and Racial Identity"
5. Darryl Leroux, Ethnologist, "Genetic genealogy and the Invention of Indigenous Ancestry"
6. Kieran O'Doherty, Social Psychologist, Privacy and Genetic Genealogy
7. Françoise Baylis , Medical Ethicist, "The Ethics of Bio-Data & Genetic Genealogy"
8. Concluding Discussion
In this interview at Dixie State University in conjunction with DocUtah, Julia Creet discusses he... more In this interview at Dixie State University in conjunction with DocUtah, Julia Creet discusses her documentary "Data Mining the Deceased" and the scope of the industry of family history.
Papers by Julia Creet
BRILL eBooks, 2013
The Terror Haza (House of Terror, 2002) and the Holocaust Dokumentacios Kozpont es emlekgyujtemen... more The Terror Haza (House of Terror, 2002) and the Holocaust Dokumentacios Kozpont es emlekgyujtemeny (The Holocaust Documentation and Memorial Centre, 2004) opened in Budapest within two years of each other. Together, these two museums are illustrative of the phenomenology and competing affective narratives of Hungarian national memory post-89, and of post-communist countries more generally. While each museum purports to tell a specific history, both are manifestations of the political struggle over the national memory of the Second World War and its aftermath, a history that has been substantially rewritten since the end of Communism. The House of Terror enacts the ‘double occupation’ of Nazism and Communism and the Holocaust Memorial Centre archives and the deportation of the Hungarian Jews and Roma. Each museum aestheticises an affective phenomenology of historical victimisation, provoking ressentiment and melancholia respectively in visitors as a means of staging moral values and perpetuating contested memories.
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2009
The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across v... more The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across various forms, including film, painting, and photography. ''Calling on Witnesses'' explores the particular case of the ethical appeal of the deictic in Charlotte Delbo's memoir Auschwitz and After and Michael Redhill's drama Goodness, two texts that exemplify the tensions between first-and secondhand witnesses. The deictic, best known as an ethics of exchangeability, operates differently here, where secondhand witnesses are rebuked for not knowing the experience of the other. In a new formulation of the ethics of the deictic, ''Calling on Witnesses,'' argues that second-person, secondhand witnesses are called upon to pay attention to their own future capacity for ethical and/or unethical action rather than the immediate details of testimony, which can only be transmitted as history.
One of the most important witnesses of the Holocaust, and a writer of astonishing literary range ... more One of the most important witnesses of the Holocaust, and a writer of astonishing literary range and volume, H.G. Adler produced a vast and complex body of writing, most of it in German, but remained little known during his lifetime aside from his encyclopedic study Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Belated recognition is arriving with the recent translation of his modernist Holocaust trilogy. Gathering together the foremost Adler scholars in the world, this collection of essays is the first in English dedicated to Adler's Gesamtkunstwerk.
Contemporary Women's Writing, Jan 21, 2017
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2011
This paper is a brief overview of the concept of the transnational archive as a counterpoint to t... more This paper is a brief overview of the concept of the transnational archive as a counterpoint to the idea that a national archive is necessarily a locus of a static idea of nation. The Canadian national archives is used as a case study of an archives that was transnational in its inception, and one that has continued to change in its mandate and materials as a response to patterns in migration and changing notions of multiculturalism as a Canadian federal policy. It introduces the most recent formation of the transnational archive and its denizens: the genealogical archive inhabited by family historians.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2023
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2023
The Genealogical Sublime, 2020
What’s wrong with The Women’s Television Networ
Dr. Julia Creet, Chair of the English Department at York University, introduces Barbara Godard as... more Dr. Julia Creet, Chair of the English Department at York University, introduces Barbara Godard as one of Canada's pre-eminent literary scholars, whose work has influenced the fields of Canadian and Quebec literatures, translation studies, feminist poetics, and narratology. She offers a brief overview of Dr. Godard's career, her publications, and her academic mentoring and supervision.These were the opening comments to welcome Dr. Godard and the attendees to the “Inspiring Collaborations,” written and delivered by Julia Creet
The Genealogical Sublime, 2020
Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry... more Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.
In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world’s genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.
Watch a 30 minute summary of the book: https://youtu.be/9fkJdgLgXxw
H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to t... more H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to the life and work of German-language author H. G. Adler. Among the international scholars of German, Jewish, and Holocaust literature and history who reveal the range of Adler’s legacy across genres are Adler’s son, Jeremy Adler, and Peter Filkins, translator of Adler’s trilogy, The Journey, Panorama and The Wall. Together, the essays examine Adler's writing in relation to his life, especially his memory as a survivor of the Nazi death camps and his posthumous recognition for having produced a Gesamt-kunstwerk, an aesthetic synthesis of the Shoah. The book carries the moral charge of Adler's work, moving beyond testimony to a complex dialectic between fact and fiction, exploring Adler's experiments with voice and the ethical work of literary engagement with the Shoah.
The link between memory and place has historically attended the study of memory in every sense: i... more The link between memory and place has historically attended the study of memory in every sense: in its contents (our attachment to memories of home); in its practices (place as an aid to rote memorization); in its externalizations (monuments and museums); in its linguistic expressions (“I can’t quite place you”); and, in its psychological and physiological theorizations (the conscious and unconscious brain as the loci of memory, firing across well- or little-used synaptic gaps). As Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starns put it, “Proust’s petite Madeleine, Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal work on the ‘social frames’ of collective memory, and even cognitive studies and biological research on the ‘location’ of memory in the brain are all reminders that memory seeks its local habitations.” The contributors to Memory and Migration explore this crucial observation about the locations of memory in relation to a pressing contemporary question: How do we understand memory that has migrated or has been exiled from its local habitations? It would be a simpler question if mobility and distance weren’t generally understood to produce “artificial” memory, or something akin to history. But, in this volume we argue that migration rather than location is the condition of memory. Between times, places, generations and media, from individuals to communities and vice versa, movement is what produces memory—and our anxieties about pinning it to place. How then do we understand the fixity of place in memory, intensified in an age of mass migrations?
Review of Memory and Migration: http://migration.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/13/migration.mns009.short
“Data Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family” https://juliacreet.vhx.tv/ M... more “Data Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family”
https://juliacreet.vhx.tv/
More than half of North Americans are fascinated by genealogy and invested in their family histories. The emotional impact is profound. Some gain a sense of identity by uncovering their ancestors, their culture, and their country of origin. Others find it devastating and disorienting when they discover that their history differs from what they have always believed. But there is another side to the rise in genealogy that goes beyond human interest. It is arguably the largest historical enterprise in the world, and one of the largest data mining operations, driven by big religion, big business and big technology. Data Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family explores the industry behind the exponential intensity of genealogy. What are the motivations of the key players and how are their ambitions affecting the millions of North Americans who are searching for answers?
Watch the trailer on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zooJhgP8Gxg
Part literary detective story and part personal journey, MUM is a documentary drawn from Magda Cr... more Part literary detective story and part personal journey, MUM is a documentary drawn from Magda Creet's memoirs, letters and poems, an archive of a holocaust survivor who left a paper trail to her hidden past. The trail leads to Hungary, where local memory reveals the story my mother tried to forget.
Originally streamed from the Archives of Ontario, Sept 21, 2018, 2018
Leading experts explore the science, medical ethics, privacy implications and social meanings of... more Leading experts explore the science, medical ethics, privacy implications and social meanings of the direct-to-consumer genetic genealogy industry. Each video is 20 mins.
1. Land acknowledgement and Opening remarks
2. Susan Young, Professional Genealogist, "Where Genealogy Meets Genetics"
3. Hendrik Poinar, Evolutionary Geneticist, "The Science of Genetic Genealogy"
4. Wendy Roth, Sociologist, "Genetic Genealogy & Racial and Racial Identity"
5. Darryl Leroux, Ethnologist, "Genetic genealogy and the Invention of Indigenous Ancestry"
6. Kieran O'Doherty, Social Psychologist, Privacy and Genetic Genealogy
7. Françoise Baylis , Medical Ethicist, "The Ethics of Bio-Data & Genetic Genealogy"
8. Concluding Discussion
In this interview at Dixie State University in conjunction with DocUtah, Julia Creet discusses he... more In this interview at Dixie State University in conjunction with DocUtah, Julia Creet discusses her documentary "Data Mining the Deceased" and the scope of the industry of family history.
BRILL eBooks, 2013
The Terror Haza (House of Terror, 2002) and the Holocaust Dokumentacios Kozpont es emlekgyujtemen... more The Terror Haza (House of Terror, 2002) and the Holocaust Dokumentacios Kozpont es emlekgyujtemeny (The Holocaust Documentation and Memorial Centre, 2004) opened in Budapest within two years of each other. Together, these two museums are illustrative of the phenomenology and competing affective narratives of Hungarian national memory post-89, and of post-communist countries more generally. While each museum purports to tell a specific history, both are manifestations of the political struggle over the national memory of the Second World War and its aftermath, a history that has been substantially rewritten since the end of Communism. The House of Terror enacts the ‘double occupation’ of Nazism and Communism and the Holocaust Memorial Centre archives and the deportation of the Hungarian Jews and Roma. Each museum aestheticises an affective phenomenology of historical victimisation, provoking ressentiment and melancholia respectively in visitors as a means of staging moral values and perpetuating contested memories.
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2009
The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across v... more The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across various forms, including film, painting, and photography. ''Calling on Witnesses'' explores the particular case of the ethical appeal of the deictic in Charlotte Delbo's memoir Auschwitz and After and Michael Redhill's drama Goodness, two texts that exemplify the tensions between first-and secondhand witnesses. The deictic, best known as an ethics of exchangeability, operates differently here, where secondhand witnesses are rebuked for not knowing the experience of the other. In a new formulation of the ethics of the deictic, ''Calling on Witnesses,'' argues that second-person, secondhand witnesses are called upon to pay attention to their own future capacity for ethical and/or unethical action rather than the immediate details of testimony, which can only be transmitted as history.
One of the most important witnesses of the Holocaust, and a writer of astonishing literary range ... more One of the most important witnesses of the Holocaust, and a writer of astonishing literary range and volume, H.G. Adler produced a vast and complex body of writing, most of it in German, but remained little known during his lifetime aside from his encyclopedic study Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Belated recognition is arriving with the recent translation of his modernist Holocaust trilogy. Gathering together the foremost Adler scholars in the world, this collection of essays is the first in English dedicated to Adler's Gesamtkunstwerk.
Contemporary Women's Writing, Jan 21, 2017
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2011
This paper is a brief overview of the concept of the transnational archive as a counterpoint to t... more This paper is a brief overview of the concept of the transnational archive as a counterpoint to the idea that a national archive is necessarily a locus of a static idea of nation. The Canadian national archives is used as a case study of an archives that was transnational in its inception, and one that has continued to change in its mandate and materials as a response to patterns in migration and changing notions of multiculturalism as a Canadian federal policy. It introduces the most recent formation of the transnational archive and its denizens: the genealogical archive inhabited by family historians.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2023
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2023
The Genealogical Sublime, 2020
What’s wrong with The Women’s Television Networ
Dr. Julia Creet, Chair of the English Department at York University, introduces Barbara Godard as... more Dr. Julia Creet, Chair of the English Department at York University, introduces Barbara Godard as one of Canada's pre-eminent literary scholars, whose work has influenced the fields of Canadian and Quebec literatures, translation studies, feminist poetics, and narratology. She offers a brief overview of Dr. Godard's career, her publications, and her academic mentoring and supervision.These were the opening comments to welcome Dr. Godard and the attendees to the “Inspiring Collaborations,” written and delivered by Julia Creet
A personal look at the art of Eli Lange
A Modernist in Exile, 2019
Contemporary Women's Writing, 2017
Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE, 2009
The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across v... more The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across various forms, including film, painting, and photography. ''Calling on Witnesses'' explores the particular case of the ethical appeal of the deictic in Charlotte Delbo's memoir Auschwitz and After and Michael Redhill's drama Goodness, two texts that exemplify the tensions between first-and secondhand witnesses. The deictic, best known as an ethics of exchangeability, operates differently here, where secondhand witnesses are rebuked for not knowing the experience of the other. In a new formulation of the ethics of the deictic, ''Calling on Witnesses,'' argues that second-person, secondhand witnesses are called upon to pay attention to their own future capacity for ethical and/or unethical action rather than the immediate details of testimony, which can only be transmitted as history.
Lost in the Archives, 2002