Cristina Pividori and Christina Howes participated in the Place of Memory and Memory of Place Conference held at Birkbeck, University of London, on 20-21 June 2026 with the paper “In the Shadow of War: Classed Postmemory and Affective Domesticity in Beverly Gologorsky.”
Their joint paper examined Beverly Gologorsky’s fiction through the concept of classed postmemory, arguing that the transmission of war is not only 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), they explored how Gologorsky relocates the afterlives of war to domestic and para-domestic spaces, where conflict becomes embedded in ordinary life.
The paper argued that, in Gologorsky’s work, domestic spaces are not just refuges from violence but places 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), Pividori and Howes read these everyday spaces as vernacular memoryscapes, where grief, vigilance and care accumulate in recurring gestures and routines.
Their presentation contributed to wider discussions on memory, class, gender, and the home front, showing how Gologorsky’s fiction makes visible the working-class communities that continue to live, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of war.
