The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships Program awards 65 fellowships annually. The fellowships support a year of research and writing to help advanced graduate students in the humanities and social sciences in the last year of Ph.D. dissertation writing.

Valentina Rozas-Krause is a PhD candidate in Architectural History at University of California Berkeley. The subject of her dissertation is Architecture and the Cult of Apology. Her abstract follows:

In 2004, when Argentina’s president apologized for the state’s crimes committed during the last military dictatorship (1976-83), he also inaugurated a new memorial. Fixing his words in stone, he expropriated a 42-acre lot form the Navy to transform it into a ‘memory campus.’ Memorials like this one embody more than memory: they are built as symbols of remorse or reparation. This dissertation traces this emerging phenomenon by examining the ‘cult of apology’ through its global manifestation in memorials. The ‘cult of apology’ offers a critical lens to analyze how in the last decades these two previously separate phenomena —the boom of memorials and the rise of apologies— have become intertwined. Examining five representative case studies in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco, the dissertation builds an empirical and theoretical understanding on multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, the actors involved in it, the material forms that it takes, and the diverse effects that it produces.

This program is made possible by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Read  about past Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows here.

Rozas-Krause has been an SAH member since 2015, and has presented work at the 70th, 71st and 72nd SAH Annual International Conferences.