Watch Prof. Creet summarizing The Genealogical Sublime in this 30 minute talk.
In this talk, drawn from her new book, The Genealogical Sublime, Dr. Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative and rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. Through a thought-provoking discussion, she will highlight how, 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.
Speaker: Dr. Julia Creet, Professor – Department of English
English professor Dr. Julia Creet is a leading international scholar in Cultural Memory Studies. She’s the recipient of the President’s Research Impact Award 2019 at York for her research on digital privacy, data mining, genealogy and memory, and winner of the Jewish Thought & Culture Award from the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards. Dr. Creet is co-editor of Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (UTP 2010) and H.G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (Northwestern UP 2016). She has produced and directed two documentary films: MUM: A Story of Silence (2008), a personal story about a Holocaust survivor who tried to forget her experience, and Mining the Deceased: Ancestry and the Business of Family (2017), a documentary investigating the cultural and technological zeitgeist of genealogy.
