Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi academic interest focused in the last decade on the notions of collective memory and commemorations at the macro social level. More specifically, she is curious about the ways in which societies cope with their difficult pasts, embarrassing moments, shameful events and the like. Within that framework, she is working on the ingredients from which the sociology of commemoration is made (time, space, discourse and agency) and on commemoration as a lens through which one can study various social groups more generally. In addition, she is interested in the city as a text, in autobiographical occasions, in the sociology of courtrooms, in the notions of silence and forgetting and in the ways in which death is announced and managed. Her research agendas spin themselves out between the emotional turbulence of the high school reunion in the United States (see under After Pomp and Circumstance, University of Chicago Press, 1998) the commemoration of an assassinated Prime Minister in the context of the fractured collective identity of society in Israel (see under, Yitzhak Rabin Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, State University of New York Press, 2009); between the knock on the door which announces the worst news of all and the everyday drama of the courtroom. In each instance, an autobiographical occasion of crisis at the individual, the organizational or the national level occupies center stage, as do questions of memory and identity, the management of emotion and the quest for meaning within the constraints and opportunities afforded by culture and social structures. She is editor of (together with Jeffrey K. Olick and Daniel Levy) The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011). Recent papers include “On Cloud Nine: Positive Memories in American Presidential Speeches” (with Tracy Adams) in Memory Studies (2019), and “A Living Place: On the Sociology of Atmosphere in Home Museums” (with Irit Dekel) in the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology (2017). Currently, Vered is the academic head of the Truan Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a board member of the Israeli Institute for Democracy. She was Visiting Professor at New York University in Fall 2018, and was the Ginor Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Spring 2019. (CCS Visiting Fellow, August 2009 – August 2010)
