PAMLA is delighted to welcome Past PAMLA President Peter Schulman (Old Dominion University) to deliver his Presidential Address, originally scheduled for PAMLA 2025, at this year’s conference in Seattle.
In “Palimpsests of Melancholy: Paris, New York, Norfolk, and the Resistance to Speed,” Schulman reads the modern city as a palimpsest: a space in which traces of past lives, histories, and losses remain visible beneath the surfaces of the present. Moving through Paris, New York, Norfolk, and beyond, the address considers how these hidden urban histories might offer a quiet resistance to the speed and amnesia of contemporary life.
“Palimpsests of Melancholy: Paris, New York, Norfolk, and the Resistance to Speed”
Thursday, November 12, 2026
4:45 PM–5:45 PM
Columbia A (3rd Floor)
Returning 100% healthy after last year’s unexpected health absence, Past-President Peter Schulman explores how Paris, New York, and Norfolk hide historical indices of disappearance—from Yiddish theater markers to Parisian landmarks—offering a quiet, melancholic resistance to the speed and amnesia of modern development. Drawing on the work of artist Sophie Calle, novelist Paul Auster, and anthropologist Marc Augé, Schulman explores notions of disappearance in contemporary urban settings and asks what might be revealed when we learn to look beneath the surfaces of the modern city. In Paris, a city marked by layers of architectural and historical memory, lesser-known monuments and plaques preserve traces of those who have disappeared—from markers commemorating children deported to concentration camps during the Occupation to memorials for resistance fighters largely absent from conventional historical narratives. In New York, meanwhile, indices of past lives remain hidden in plain sight. The “Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame” outside the former Second Avenue Deli—now a Chase Bank—can easily disappear beneath the feet of pedestrians rushing across the stars embedded in the pavement. When one scratches beneath the walls, streets, and edifices of these cities, Schulman argues, a defining melancholia emerges: one capable of acting as a form of resistance to the speed, change, and oblivion characteristic of contemporary life, an era Paul Virilio described as the “age of inertia.” Following Augé, the address asks how we might learn—or relearn—how to read cities as spaces filled with hidden texts, memories, and messages waiting to be discovered.
Peter Schulman is Professor of French and International Studies at Old Dominion University and an Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric and has edited a critical edition of Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions as well as co-edited numerous scholarly volumes. His translations include Verne’s final novel, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, and the collection A Thousand and Second Night and Other Plays, along with Georges Simenon’s The Thirteen Culprits, Marie Darrieussecq’s On Waves, Jacques Réda’s Suburban Beauty, Céline Zins’s Adamah, Ying Chen’s Impressions of Summer, and Silvia Baron Supervielle’s Pages of Travel. Schulman is co-editor-in-chief of Green Humanities, a journal devoted to ecocriticism. He also translated Marie Nimier’s play Another Year, Another Christmas, which has been performed in Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. He has directed two radio plays and served as associate producer of the documentary I Found It at the Video Store.
We hope you’ll join us in Seattle for this special presentation of Peter Schulman’s Past-Presidential Address.