Professor
On Leave FA24
Office Information:
3759 Haven Hall, 1045
734-615-8869
Fields of Study:
Memorials, memory, material culture, cultural infrastructure, structures of inequity, race, and racism, U.S. cultural history and museum studies.
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1994Highlighted Work and Publications
BLUNT INSTRUMENTS Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices
Kristin Hass
Blunt Instruments is a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future.
Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell...
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Carried to the Wall
Kristin Hass
On May 9, 1990, a bottle of Jack Daniels, a ring with letter, a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, a baseball, a photo album, an ace of spades, and a pie were some of the objects left at the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. For Kristin Hass, this eclectic sampling represents an attempt by ordinary Americans to come to terms with a multitude of unnamed losses as well as to take part in the ongoing debate of how this war should be remembered. Hass explores the restless memory of the Vietnam War and an American public still grappling with its commemoration. In doing so it considers the ways Americans ...
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Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall
Kristin Hass
For the city’s first two hundred years, the story told at Washington DC’s symbolic center, the National Mall, was about triumphant American leaders. Since 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, the narrative has shifted to emphasize the memory of American wars. In the last thirty years, five significant war memorials have been built on, or very nearly on, the Mall. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, The National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During WWII, and the National World War II...
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