Jennifer Ladino

Experiencing War Memorials is a compelling edited collection of essays that examines how war is commemorated through public memorials and the powerful emotions and ideologies these sites generate. Drawing on fields such as war studies, affect studies, public memory studies, and the environmental humanities, the volume demonstrates that commemoration is not only an intellectual act but an embodied, affective experience.

Through diverse case studies, contributors analyze how memorials shape public feelings about fast and slow violence, including battles, massacres, and incarceration. The essays reveal how materials, landscapes, narrative conventions, and innovative memorial forms guide emotional responses such as grief, pride, ambivalence, and outrage while making injustice perceptible. Against the backdrop of ongoing debates over heritage and violence, the collection insists on the importance of attending to the messy and disordered emotional dimensions of public memory. Some essays explore varied human and animal experiences, including military working dogs; scrutinize unsettling sites such as Confederate monuments and overlooked Holocaust locations; and consider digital, ecological, and pandemic-era memorials that expand the boundaries of commemoration.

Edited by Jennifer K. Ladino, Experiencing War Memorials offers nuanced insights into how memorial practices shape national identities, ethical understanding, and the possibilities for social change, illuminating the profound ways public remembrance influences how societies feel, remember, and reckon with violence in all its forms. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of memory studies, war and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and American studies, as well as museum professionals, artists, and readers interested in the politics and emotions of public commemoration.

From the sculptured peaks of Mount Rushmore to the Coloradan prairie lands at Sand Creek to the idyllic islands of the Pacific, the West’s signature environments add a new dimension to the study of memorials. In such diverse and often dramatic landscapes, how do the natural and built environments shape our emotions?

In Memorials Matter, author Jennifer Ladino investigates the natural and physical environments of seven diverse National Park Service (NPS) sites in the American West and how they influence emotions about historical conflict and national identity. Chapters center around the region’s diverse inhabitants (Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans) and the variously traumatic histories these groups endured—histories of oppression, exploitation, incarceration, slavery, and genocide. Drawing on material ecocritical theory, Ladino emphasizes the ideological and political importance of memorials and how they evoke visceral responses that are not always explicitly “storied,” but nevertheless matter in powerful ways.

In this unique blend of narrative scholarship and critical theory, Ladino demonstrates how these memorial sites and their surrounding landscapes, combined with written texts, generate emotion and shape our collective memory of traumatic events. She urges us to consider our everyday environments and to become attuned to features and feelings we might have otherwise overlooked.

"Affective Ecocriticism approaches emergent affects in relation to environments with a sense of urgency and an accessible style that will speak to readers across a range of disciplinary and geographic locations"--
Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant and important volume imagines a more affective--and consequently more effective--ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies. These interdisciplinary essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales such as Canada's Tar Sands. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness--all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism. Affective Ecocriticism offers an accessible approach to this theoretical intersection that will speak to readers across multiple disciplinary and geographic locations.

Finalist for the ASLE Book Award in Ecocriticism, 2013

Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.