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James V. Wertsch studies language, thought, and culture, with a special focus on national memory and narratives. His publications include the authored volumes Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1985), Voices of the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1991), Mind as Action (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge University Press, 2002), as well as edited volumes with Cambridge University Press on Vygotsky and memory studies. After finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Wertsch was a postdoctoral fellow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where he studied with the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria. Wertsch has held faculty positions at Northwestern University, the University of California, San Diego, Clark University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he has also been Vice Chancellor for International Affairs. He is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Education, and he holds honorary degrees from Linköping University and the University of Oslo. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and has served as a guest professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and at Fudan University in Shanghai.
How Nations Remember asks how it is that entire nations can have such different views of the past. These are differences over specific events such as World War II, but they also take the form of different mental habits that shape national memory more generally. Drawing on psychology, anthropology, literary studies, and other disciplines, and on illustrations from Russia, America, China, and Georgia, the author examines notions such as "narrative templates," "narrative dialogism," and "privileged event narratives" that shape national memory, and concludes by outlining strategies for managing its destructive consequences.
