ADA, Okla. - East Central University professor Dr. Jennifer McMahon is scheduled to speak at an event titled “Commemorating a National Tragedy: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Remembrance,” on Sept. 11 at 3:30 p.m. in the Estep Multimedia Center, located inside the Bill S. Cole University Center on the ECU campus.

The event is free and open to the public.

“The talk was initially conceived of as a presentation for Honors Program students to prepare them for a field trip to Tulsa on September 12,” said McMahon. “However, when we booked Estep for Sept. 11 and saw that date on the calendar, I was struck by a feeling of obligation. I felt like the topic I had planned was not an appropriate focus for the day, at least not how I had conceived it.”

McMahon said she felt a responsibility to honor the tragedy of Sept. 11, “especially given the fact that our initial target audience for the talk is made largely of students who were born after the attacks occurred.”

This event, she said, offers an opportunity to commemorate the lives lost on 9/11 while drawing on her academic background in ethics and the philosophy of art to reflect more broadly on the role of art in public life, “specifically its role as an agent of remembrance, an agent that can transfigure our engagement with tragedy in positive ways,” she explained.

McMahon plans to guide her audience through a reflection on the nature of memory, both individual and collective, in the ways in which memory can be elicited, and the various reasons we should remember tragic events, “though we might prefer to let the memory of tragedy fade.”

As part of her discussion, McMahon will reference art theorist Arthur Danto and his analysis of the differential role of monuments and memorials as instruments of remembrance. She will continue this conversation at a separate event in October titled “Vietnam (is not) 50,” where she will speak about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“Interestingly, the lecture now seems to have grown into something bigger than what was originally intended, something that suggests a larger, intuitive sense of the moral appropriateness of some formal act of remembrance on 9/11,” she concluded.

The day following the event, ECU Honors Program students will travel to Tulsa to visit Greenwood Rising, a nonprofit museum dedicated to educating the public about Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District, the Black Wall Street mindset and America’s ongoing racial challenges.

The students will also attend a stage production of “Hairspray,” a musical that tackles sensitive topics such as race and civil rights through the lens of music and comedy. “Hairspray” was the original topic of McMahon’s lecture.

“Dr. McMahon is a brilliant cultural critic,” said Dr. Steve Benton, Director of the ECU Honors Program, “, and I’m excited to hear her insights into how we commemorate national tragedies like the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Jim Crow Era, and the 9/11 attacks through such divergent media as film, musical comedies, and interactive museums.”

For more information on the ECU Honors Program, contact Dr. Steve Benton at sbenton@ecok.edu.

-ECU-