Short Bio: Monica Eileen Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University. She received her doctorate in Anthropology and History and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. Patterson is coeditor of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press, 2011). As a scholar, curator, and activist, she is particularly interested in the intersections of memory, childhood, and violence in postcolonial Africa, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres.
Research: Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as Counter-Museum, in Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2011); Childhood, Memory and Gap: Reflections from an Anthrohistorian on George Perec’s ‘W or the Memory of Childhood,’ in Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press, 2011); The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa, in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013);