English prof talks about making her documentary film MUM

The second lecture in the Research & Artistic Creation Lecture Series, hosted by York’s Department of English and Faculty of Education, will feature English Professor Julia Creet speaking about her memoir and documentary film, MUM.

Creet will deliver her talk on Tuesday, Oct. 27, from 5:30 to 8:30pm in 305 York Lanes, Keele campus.

Left: Julia Creet

Part literary detective story and part personal journey, MUM is a documentary drawn from Creet’s mother Magda’s memoirs, letters and poems, an archive of a Holocaust survivor who left a paper trail to her hidden Jewish past. The trail led to Hungary, where local memory reveals the story that Creet’s mother tried to forget and keep secret. Creet’s Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada funded research led to the creation of the 37-minute film in an effort to repair or complete a failed autobiography – for autobiographies can and do fail – and to restore what has haunted her – her mother’s misrecognition and the audience she never reached. For more on the film, see YFile, May 6, 2008. 

Creet specializes in memory studies, literary non-fiction and sexuality studies. She is the co-editor, with York humanities Professor Andreas Kitzmann, of the forthcoming Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2010), and is the producer and director of MUM. She has published numerous essays on identity, memory and testimony in various academic and literary journals, including differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Applied Semiotics, Paradoxa, English Studies in Canada and Resources for Feminist Research, as well as Toronto Life, West Coast Line and Exile. Several of her essays have been translated into Hungarian and Polish and others published in edited collections in Sweden and the Netherlands.

The Research & Artistic Creation Lecture series, organized by English and education Professor Rishma Dunlop, is designed to address the needs of researchers interested in interdisciplinary scholarly research that involves artistic production as integral to the research.

The series is of interest to creative writers, literary scholars and artists, and is a component of Dunlop’s graduate seminar in advanced research methods, Research & Artistic Creation, offered through the Faculty of Education’s Graduate Program in Language, Culture & Teaching since 2000. The course consistently draws participants from theatre studies, English, creative writing, music, visual arts, documentary photography, film, dance and education. 

The event will include a film screening and talk about the research process. Everyone is welcome.