Mnemonics 2015 will take place at two venues: Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London, UK W1B 2HW (8th September) and K2.40, Strand Campus, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS (9th and 10th September). Registration takes place on September 8th, between 9.30-10am. Please give your name to the staff at reception when you arrive at the University. Participants who are staying in University accommodation can access their rooms from 2pm on September 7th.
8th September University of Westminster, Fyvie Hall
9.30-10.00: Registration and breakfast
10.00-10.15: Welcome: Professor Anna Reading
10.15-11.30: Keynote 1: Professor Ursula Heise (UCLA):
‘The Silent Mechanics of Extinction’ (Chair: Anna Reading)
11.30-11.45: Break
11.45 – 1.00: Panel 1: Material Hierarchies (Chair and respondent: Brett Ashley Kaplan)
- Luis Berríos-Negrón (Konstfack/KTH): ‘Site-Specific Greenhouse Superstructures and Social (Hyperobjective) Pedestals’
- Gitanjali Pyndiah (Goldsmiths): ‘The thing in things’
- Igor Vynokurov (European University Institute): ‘Fighting against the Fallen or Reconciling Oneself with Them? The ‘Alien’ War Dead and ‘Memorial Enclaves’ in the Soviet Union (1920–39)’
1.00 – 2.00: Lunch
2.00 – 3.15:
Panel 2: Material Conflicts (Chair: Rick Crownshaw)
- Maria Zirra (Stockholm University / Ghent University) ‘Glassing in Disobedient Objects: Transcultural Activist Memory at the V&A’
- Holly Brown (Gent University, Belgium): ‘Re-burying the socially dead; an exploration of the American state’s withdrawal from public display of the artifacts from the 1971 Attica prison uprising’
- Sarah Feinstein (University of Manchester): ‘The Material Culture of Political Violence: Her Majesty’s Prison Maze/Long Kesh’
3.20 – 4.35: Panel 3: Telling Objects (Chair and respondent: Astrid Erll)
- Sera Waters (University of South Australia): ‘Comfort Matters: Settling in South Australia’
- Kelsey Madsen (University of Oklahoma): ‘Curated Clutter in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997)’
- Catherine Charlwood (University of Warwick): ‘Hands behind hands’: Material memories in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost’
4.35 – 4.45: Coffee
4.45 – 6.00: Keynote 2: Professor Alex Warwick (Westminster): ‘That Speechless Past’ (Chair: Lucy Bond)
6.00 – 8.00: Drinks reception and Early Career Researcher book launch:
- Lucy Bond, Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)
- Christopher Lloyd, Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
- Jessica Rapson, Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (Berghahn, 2015)
9th September King’s College London, Room K2.40
9.00-10.00: Breakfast and meeting for panels 1, 2, and 3 and their chairs over coffee
10.00 – 11.15: Panel 4: Bodies (Chair and respondent: Amanda Lagerkvist)
- Alyssa Anderson (Brown University): ‘Body as Object: “Proof,” Testimony, and Speaking the Unspeakable’
- Sophia Levine (Urbana-Champaign): ‘D(a/e)bk(e/a)h: Dance as Monument’
- Jennifer L. Baldwin (Urbana-Champaign): ‘The Traces of Trauma: Neuroscience and the New Materiality of Traumatic Memory in US Combat Veterans’
11.15 – 11.25: Coffee Break
11.25 – 12.40: Keynote 3: Professor Joanne Garde-Hansen (Warwick):
‘Energy for Memory: Mining Business Archives, Corporate Memory and Workers’ Stories in the UK and Brazil’ (Chair: Jessica Rapson)
12.40 – 1.40: Lunch on site and Edited Collection book launch:
Anna Reading, Tamar Katriel, eds. Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
1.40 – 2.55: Panel 5: Urban Materialities (Chair and respondent: Anna Reading)
- Adam Gajdos (Masaryk University in Brno): ‘Of Bones, Bulldozers and Building Sites: Reclaiming Memory in a (Nearly) Vacant Space’
- Vera Knútsdóttir (University of Iceland): ‘Spectralites, Cultural Memory, and the Urban Space’
- Ifor Duncan (Goldsmiths, University of London): ‘Flood Imaginaries: Watermarks, Memory and Submerged Futures’
3.00 – 4.15: Panel 6: Materiality in the Visual Arts (Chair and respondent: Jessica Rapson)
- Steve Smith (University of Westminster): ‘The Palimpsestuous Artwork – Re-inscribing occluded time on a site’
- Sara Callahan (Stockholm University): ‘The Materiality of the Photographic Object in Artworks by Akram Zaatari and Joachim Koester’
- John Hillman (Plymouth College of Art / Falmouth University): ‘Situational assemblages’
4.15-4.30: Coffee
4.30 – 5.45: Panel 7: Marginalized Materialities (Chair and respondent: Stef Craps)
- David Torell (King’s College London): ‘A More Profound Condemnation that you May be Able to Understand: Excavating the 1967 Russell Tribunal and Contemplating Cultural Amnesia’
- Jarula M. I. Wegner (Goethe University): ‘Material Marginality: The Sonic Texture of Reality Rap’
- Gruia Bădescu (University of Cambridge): ‘Making Sense of Ruins: Collective Memory and Urban Reconstruction in Belgrade and Sarajevo’
5.45 – 7.00: ‘How to get published’ – discussion with journal and book series editors
7.30 – 9.30: Summer School dinner, Bill’s Restaurant, Covent Garden (participants and partners only)
10th September King’s College London, Room K2.40
9.00-9.30: Breakfast and coffee
9.30 – 10.45: Panel 8: Narratives of Materiality (Chair and respondent: Lucy Bond)
- Jessica Young (Urbana-Champaign): ‘The Material and Human Dimensions of Memory in Hari Kunzru’s Memory Palace’
- Lukas Brasiskis (New York University): ‘Reconsideration of Materiality of Monumental Memory in Films by Contemporary Artists from Baltic Countries’
- Erin Högerle (Goethe University): ‘Object Communication and Memory Construction in the Migration Film’
10.45 – 12.30: Keynote 4: Professor Stef Craps (Ghent):
‘Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory’ (Chair: Lucy Bond)
Followed by questions and closing comments
12.30 – 1.30: Meetings for panels 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and their chairs
1.30 – 2.30: Partners’ lunch and business discussion
