Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies
The Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies is a collaboration between scholars from primarily Copenhagen University and Aarhus University. It is a continuation of a network at Aarhus University founded in 2008 comprising scholars from Aesthetics, Scandinavian studies, Anthropology, and History. The central focus of the network is the aesthetics and practices of memory cultures and works of art. Approximately 15 faculty and 15 graduate students are part of the network.
Contacts: Sara Dybris McQuaid, Wulf Kansteiner, Jessica Ortner & Tea Sindbæk Andersen
Flemish Memory Studies Network
The Flemish Memory Studies Network coordinates research and doctoral training activities in memory studies at Ghent University and KU Leuven. Ghent University’s Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI) brings together scholars from across the humanities whose research revolves around memory and trauma as mediated through culture. Among other memory studies activities, KU Leuven hosts the TMSS project, which examines to what extent and under what conditions the life narratives of refugees from Africa’s Great Lakes Region evolve, travel, and transform across time and space.
Contacts: Stef Craps, Silvana Mandolessi, David Mwambari & Pieter Vermeulen
Goethe University Frankfurt
The Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform brings together interdisciplinary and international research on memory. Its main research lines are transcultural memory, the mediality of memory, and memory and narrative.
Contact: Astrid Erll & Hanna Teichler
London Cultural Memory Consortium
The London Cultural Memory Consortium (LCMC) brings together scholars working in literature, culture and the creative industries at Goldsmiths, King’s College London, and the University of Westminster. Advocating a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach to the study of memory, the current research interests of the Consortium focus on the materiality of memory, particularly in relationship to emergent discourses surrounding biopolitics, environmentalism, climate change, and the Anthropocene. In 2013, the Consortium launched its inauguration with a conference on Memory and Restitution at the University of Westminster. Since 2014, the LCMC has been responsible for coordinating and coorganizing an ongoing series of colloquia under the rubric of the Natural History of Memory. These events, hosted across UK and European universities, have brought international scholars together to consider the manifold ways in which the material environment might be mobilized in and affected by diverse forms of historical violence.
Contacts: Lucy Bond, Rick Crownshaw, Jessica Rapson & Anna Reading
Swedish Memory Studies Network
The Swedish Memory Studies Network coordinates research activities in the field of memory studies at Stockholm University, Lund University, and Södertörn University.
Contacts: Victoria Fareld, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa & Hans Ruin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative was inaugurated in fall 2009 at the University of Illinois. The interdisciplinary initiative—housed within the Program in Jewish Culture and Society—provides a platform for cutting-edge research, teaching, and public engagement related to the history, memory, and representation of genocide and trauma. The faculty offer courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels through departments such as Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Religion, and Slavic Studies. The Initiative also offers a Graduate Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. HGMS regularly hosts a works-in-progress seminar where local and visiting faculty and graduate students present new research. Yearly conferences and frequent distinguished lectures have brought scholars from around the world to Illinois to discuss pressing issues in the study of memory, trauma, and genocide from a variety of disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.
Contact: Brett Ashley Kaplan
Utrecht University
The Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies offers an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working in the field of cultural memory who share a common concern with developing new ways of exploring the transnational and trans-medial dynamics of cultural memory in a globalising world, exploring the complex history of memory cultures, the role of memory practices in (international) conflict and in conflict resolution; including perpetrator studies.
Contacts: Ann Rigney & Susanne C. Knittel
Columbia University (associate partner)
The University Seminar on Cultural Memory began in 2005 as an interdisciplinary colloquium welcoming graduate students and faculty from Columbia University and its neighbours. The Seminar, incepted in 2007, builds upon this already-established community and aims to further develop a vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue on contemporary issues of cultural and collective memory, including but not limited to traumatic memory, collective and national forgetting, memorialization and museology, historical consciousness and historiography, embodied memory and performance, archive and testimony. The Seminar meets monthly and, in addition to discussing chapters and works-in-progress, hosts a series of distinguished visiting speakers, working in close cooperation with relevant departments and institutes at Columbia and throughout the region.
Contacts: Marianne Hirsch & Andreas Huyssen
