How do museums, memorials, archives, and communities connect across borders to remember war, displacement, and violence? This project examines how transnational heritage networks shape the remembrance of difficult pasts, with a focus on civilian experiences of war in East Asia and beyond in the 1930s and 1940s and their ongoing afterlives.
- Introduction
- Project Team
- Why this project matters
- Research Themes
- Project Activities and Outcomes
- Acknowledgement
- Contact
This is a three-year collaborative research project based at the Australian National University, bringing together an international research team at the Australian National University, Yale University, and Duke Kunshan University. The project is funded by the Korea Heritage Service of the Republic of Korea and operated by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO.
Rather than treating museums and heritage sites as isolated and fixed destinations, the project investigates how they function as nodes within broader constellations of memory—dynamic networks of institutions, actors, and practices that connect historical experience to transnational circuits of knowledge, affect, and recognition.
The project asks not only what these networks are, but what they do: how they shape remembrance, redistribute authority across institutions, experts, and affected communities, and generate uneven patterns of recognition, learning, and dialogue across different political and cultural contexts.
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor Yujie Zhu
Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies
Australian National University
Co-Investigators
Associate Professor Kolleen Guy
Duke Kunshan University
Professor Jay Winter
Yale University
Histories of war-related violence and displacement are often framed within national narratives, yet their afterlives are fundamentally transnational. Narratives of Memory circulate through survivor testimony, archival exchange, travelling exhibitions, digital media, and commemorative activism.
This project examines how these connections shape public understandings of the past and how they produce uneven distributions of visibility, authority, and participation. It moves beyond viewing heritage as static representation, instead approaching it as relational and processual—continually remade through interaction, circulation, and public engagement.
In this sense, remembrance is not simply about preserving the past. It is an active practice through which historical knowledge, ethical responsibility, and social and political commitments to truth-telling are negotiated across borders. These processes do not resolve conflict or eliminate violence; rather, they contribute to ongoing efforts to contain, interpret, and respond to its legacies. In this respect, such work also contributes to ongoing efforts to sustain peace by confronting the histories and conditions through which violence persists.
The project addresses several interrelated themes:
Civilian experiences of war
How histories of civilians in wartime in the 1930s and 1940s in Asia and the Pacific are framed in public space, and how their experiences of violence, occupation, forced labour, displacement, and refuge are selectively remembered, silenced, or reconfigured across national and transnational contexts.
Museums and memory networks
How museums, memorials, archives, and community organisations operate as nodes within wider transnational infrastructures of remembrance of civilians at war in this period.
Gender, affect, and testimony
How memory work is shaped by gendered violence, feminist activism, survivor testimony, and practices of care, and how these forms of remembrance are unevenly recognised.
Public engagement and digital heritage
How transnational memory is mediated through exhibitions, digital platforms, and participatory forms of interpretation, and how these reshape authority and access to the public sphere of remembrance of the Second World War.
Heritage, dialogue, and historical accountability
How difficult histories are mobilised for civic education, shape contested dialogue, and generate uneven forms of historical recognition across different institutional and political settings.
The project brings together fieldwork, interviews, archival research, and collaborative exchange across multiple sites in East Asia and beyond. Outputs will include academic publications, public engagement activities, and digital resources that support cross-border dialogue on difficult histories.
This work is supported by theTransnational Heritage Joint Research Grant, funded by the Korea Heritage Service of the Republic of Korea and operated by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO.
For collaboration, enquiries, or access to project outputs, please contact:
Associate Professor Yujie Zhu
Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies
Australian National University
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