Commemorating Knowledge: A Difficult Past and the Case of Polio

Born in Tel Aviv, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi is a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and currently holds the position of faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. She is an expert on collective memory and commemoration, especially the ways societies cope with their difficult pasts. Her most recent book project, The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford UP, 2011), was co-edited with Jeffrey K. Olick and Daniel Levy; she is also the author of After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion (Chicago UP, 1998) and Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (SUNY Press, 2009), as well as articles in journals such as American Sociological Review and Social Forces.