I have held my first session with the Fellows of the Albright Institute at Wellesley, for whom I serve as their inaugural Fellows Mentor.

I presented a talk on the topic of “Distorted History and the Perversion of Politics,” which is both of profound personal interest to me and, I believe, critical to understand at our own current juncture in history.

To impress on the Fellows the importance of challenging their convictions and preconceptions, I heavily referenced a book which has challenged my own, In Praise of Forgetting by David Rieff. Writing as a contrarian to the aphorism that “those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it,” Rieff questions whether collectively remembering the traumas of the past really leads to reconciliation or justice in the present.

On this theme, I introduced them the work of EPIIC alumna Dacia Viejo Rose, with whom I had the recent pleasure of reconnecting as I interviewed her for EuropeNow on her research.

The talk was attended by a large cohort of Wellesley students, many of whom were not Fellows. I was pleased by their enthusiasm and receptivity to the topic, and I am eager to beginning working with them individually.