Pembroke Center

Ph.D. History, University of Minnesota, 2025. 

 

Eliana Chavkin is a historian of American commemorative culture and in how everyday Americans use monuments and memorials to situate themselves in American history. Her current book project, “The Monument Does Not Remember”: American Memories of World War I focuses on the thousands of World War I memorials Americans built during the interwar years across the country and how they gave voice to communities. She is particularly interested in the ways that memorials were used to advance disparate causes in the interwar years, ranging from isolationism to pacifism, and from the promotion of segregation to the fierce advocacy for civil rights. Her book seeks to determine what, if anything, was truly national in America's memory of the First World War, and how we can use memorials to tease out distinctive national trends.

 

In fall 2025, Chavkin will teach the GNSS course Designing Public Memory: Race, Gender & the Creation of the American Commemorative Landscape. In this course, students will both learn about the dominant trends in American memorials on the National Mall and around the United States, and how those memorials display a lopsided portrait of the American people, particularly when it comes to race and gender. Students will spend the semester constructing their own commemorative project in conjunction with the course, be it a walking tour, a monument, a museum exhibit, or another design of their choosing, and will gain hands-on knowledge of how objects of memory are produced.

 

Chavkin holds a Ph.D. (2025) and an M.A. (2023) from the University of Minnesota. She received her B.A. in History from Bryn Mawr College in 2016.