Though it may sound paradoxical, in Western cultures, when people talk about history, the narratives created inevitably also talk about futurity. Representations of the Past and of the Future are always articulated in the Present. This leads to what seems like another paradox: the Future has a history and has been imagined differently at different times in the past. In this senior seminar, we will reflect on the presence of the Future in the Past, on futurity and futurism, and on the retro-futures that continue to inform
how we both understand the flow of history and represent the past.
