"Haunting the Stage: Dark Tourism, Lieux de Mémoire, and the Immortal Death of Abraham Lincoln at Washington D.C.'s Ford's Theatre"

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our ninth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community - with complimentary wine and hors d'oeuvres. Free and open to the public.

One of the most popular tourist destinations in Washington, D.C. is a historic crime scene. Ford's Theatre, the location of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, both typifies and complicates Pierre Nora's notion of lieu de mémoire, a site of memory. Simultaneously operating as a history classroom, a patriotic pilgrimage site, and a dark tourism hotspot, Ford's Theatre contains three interactive lieux de mémoire—a cluster of historic buildings, a museum installation, and a working theatre—all of which continuously reconstruct the site's legendary past while keeping time with the ever-evolving present. Drawing upon the work of Nora and Marvin Carlson, as well as performance studies scholarship on dark tourism and living history museums, Meredith Conti considers the many macabre stagings that haunt Ford's Theatre (onstage, in the museum, on the streets outside), including the fateful, interrupted 1865 production of Our American Cousin. As a lieu de mémoire and a multimodal theatre of the macabre, Ford's Theatre's continuous reproductions of Lincoln's death serve to guarantee his immortality.