Richard Howells gave the keynote lecture at IAMHIST XXIV, the 24th conference of the International Association for Media and History, held this year in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference theme was ‘Media History and Cultural Memory’, Dr Howells lectured on ‘The Titanic in Modern Memory’. He anticipated next year’s 100th anniversary of the sinking by showing how the disaster had passed from personal to social memory, and in so doing had been re-animated from history into myth.
He is pictured here describing a record, released in 1912, which urged people to donate to the widows and orphans created by the disaster. As such, it was a seminal “charity record”. In the chair is Professor Nick Cull of the University of California Los Angeles, who is also President of IAMHIST.
Also speaking at the conference was Dr Wendy Burke, one of CMCI’s first PhD students, who presented an illustrated paper on changing images of occupation and resistance in Dutch films about World War II.
A second, revised and expanded edition of Richard Howells’ The Myth of the Titanic is due out from Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.
