Brown Bag Biography with Sasha Colby

January 25, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall 410

The Center for Biographical Research presents: /鈥淢ining Modernism: Fragments and Auto/biographical Construction in Writing The Matryoshka Memoirs鈥 / Sasha Colby, Director, Graduate Liberal Studies, Associate Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University Vancouver / At a distance of almost eighty years, and as we lose the last of its generation, how do we write vividly and effectively about the first person in WWII? In this talk, Sasha Colby, author of the recently published The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance, will discuss the writing of her Ukrainian grandmother's story of forced labor in the Leica Camera factory as this intersected with the Gestapo arrest of Leica Camera heiress Elsie K眉hn-Leitz and the relatively unknown story of the Leica Freedom Train. In doing so, Colby will consider the role of oral history, research, and imaginative reconstruction in the book鈥檚 writing, and how formal strategies of twentieth-century modernism provided ways of navigating the representation of multiple perspectives and the lacunae of memory. / Sasha Colby is a writer and literary historian in Simon Fraser University's Graduate Liberal Studies Program. She is the author of The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, The Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ECW Press, 2023, audiobook by Tantor Media), Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism (McGill Queen's UP, 2017), and Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson (Peter Lang, 2009). / Thursday, January 25 / Kuykendall 410 / 12PM to 1:15PM HST


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-3774

Share by email