Presenting on Beverly Gologorsky at Birkbeck
Christina Howes and I presented our paper “In the Shadow of War: Classed Postmemory and Affective Domesticity in Beverly Gologorsky” at the Place of Memory and Memory of Place Conference, held at Birkbeck, University of London, on 20-21 June 2026.
Our paper examined Beverly Gologorsky’s fiction through the concept of ‘classed postmemory.’ We argued that the transmission of war is generational, but also social and material, shaped by working-class recruitment, precarious labour, and gendered networks of care. Reading The Things We Do to Make It Home (1998) alongside Stop Here (2013), we explored how Gologorsky relocates the afterlives of war to domestic and para-domestic spaces, where conflict becomes embedded in ordinary life.
We argued that domestic spaces in Gologorsky’s work are more than a refuge from violence. They’re where the afterlives of conflict take shape. Drawing on work on classed war writing (Paul Fussell, 1983), domestic space (Susan Fraiman, 2012; Mary Favret, 2010), affect (Kathleen Steward, 2007; Laurent Berlant, 2011), and memory (Marianne Hirsch, 2012), we read these everyday spaces as vernacular memoryscapes, where grief, vigilance, and care accumulate in recurring gestures and routines.
Our talk fed into wider conversations on memory, class, gender, and the home front. Gologorsky’s fiction makes visible the working-class communities that continue to live, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of war.
