Trauma culture: Private suffering and public life

Join US-based cultural theorist Catherine Liu, Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, for a lecture on the rise of trauma culture and its historical transition from private suffering into public life. Liu examines how our culture morphed into one that privileges confession as a key mode of communication, investigating the role of digital media, art and the artist in this shift.

The lecture will be accompanied by a short reading by art historian and critic Tara Heffernan, guest editor of incoming un Magazine 18.1 The Badaud, and conclude in a discussion moderated by Stephanie Berlangieri, Curator - Research, Monash University Museum of Art.

This event is presented by Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA and un Projects. Catherine Liu's visit to Australia is supported by Griffith University Art Museum and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at University of California, Irvine and the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2021 and The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She has published extensively on critical theory and New Taiwan Cinema and psychoanalysis, as well as various topics in art criticism, museum history, and cultural politics.

^{Image: Catherine Liu. Photo: Alexander Raborn}