By Alexandra Nelson-Tomlinson
Dr. Laura Levitt, a Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender at Temple University, offered a workshop hosted by the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT focused on her 2020 book, The Objects That Remain. Her workshop entitled, “Objects Brushed by Violence: What Kinds of Stories Might They Tell?” concentrated on personal and communal stories about objects and how they can help us tell stories of violent crimes and trauma. She invited participants to ask questions and think deeply about artifacts in their own lives that may hold their own stories.
She shared her own inspiration for the book, which came from her experience of being raped in her home in Atlanta in 1989 while a religious studies doctoral student. She discussed how that moment, the ensuing legal evidence collection, and the work of other scholars prompted her to begin to imagine ordinary material objects in new ways. The aim of her project is to create, “a meditation on the allure of once ordinary artifacts that were brushed by violence: on where they take us and how they become animate, the rites and rituals around them, and the arts of holding that transform them into sacred objects through our tender care” (Levitt, 15-16). She reflected on her own experience of trying to locate the clothes and other artifacts that were taken into evidence in 1989, only to find in 2014 that they were never processed and lost long ago.
In the aftermath of that loss, she explained poignantly, in opposition to that experience, the rigorous and tender care taken to preserve Holocaust artifacts at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Just as in her book, the workshop was part personal reflection and part thoughtful exploration of discourse around ordinary objects as they are touched by violence and reanimated as sacred. Her book adeptly shifts from memoir to scholarly discourse on how these objects can produce justice, animate the sacred, and create an intimacy that transverses both time and space. She invited all in attendance, as scholars and as people surrounded by ordinary objects that can be imbued with meaning, to join her in meditating on what stories are being told.
Alexandra Nelson-Tomlinson is a Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Religious Studies, concentrating on Religion in the Americas. Her research focuses on the relationship between healthism, storytelling, morality, and American Christianity. She also has research interests in narrative medicine, identity formation, fat studies, material culture in religion, and intersectional feminist approaches to the study of religion.
