The Social Life of Memory
Mnemonics Summer School 2017, Goethe University Frankfurt
Lectures and panels will take place in rooms IG 411 (Thursday and Friday mornings, including lunch) and IG 1.314 (Thursday and Friday afternoons; Saturday) of the I.G. Farben building on Campus Westend, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main.
Thursday, 7 September 2017
9:00 – 9:45: Registration
9:45 – 10:00: Welcome and Opening Remarks – Astrid Erll (Goethe University)
10:00 – 11:15: Keynote 1: Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University): “Memories of Europe in the Art from Elsewhere”
11:15 – 11:30: Break
11:30 – 13:00: Panel 1: Inter- and Plurimedial Memory
Chair: Lucy Bond; Respondent: Brett Kaplan
- Penny Elliott (Goldsmiths College London): “Proximity and Power: Narrating the Matter of Transcultural Memory in W.G. Sebald”
- River Ramuglia (University of Ghent): “The Fallout Shelter and the Social Life of Memory”
- Anya Josephs (UCLA): “Story Hunger: Constructing Cultural Memory After Trauma”
13:00 – 14:00: Lunch
14:00 – 14:45: Tour of the Campus
14:45 – 15:45: Panel 2: Online Memory
Chair: Astrid Erll; Respondent: Ann Rigney
- Andrei Zavadski (FU Berlin): “Searching the Internet as a Mnemonic Practice: An Exploratory Study”
- Katya Linden (University of Stockholm): “The ‘Last Address’ Project: The Social, Digital and Existential Dynamics of Resurrecting Memories of the Repressed Dead”
15:45 – 16:00: Break
16:00 – 17:30: Panel 3: Performing Memory
Chair: Jan Rupp; Respondent: Stef Craps
- Lena Nieper (Goethe University): “The Heterochrony of Performance: Performing Steve Reich/Beryl Korot’s The Cave“
- Alyssa Anderson (Brown University): “The (Social) Archive and the Repertoire: Performing the Memory of School Shootings”
- Carmen Wong (University of Warwick): “The Past Perfect Kitchen: Materiality and Memory Spaces in Unmade, Untitled“
17:30 – 18:00: Exhibition
Chair: Jarula Wegner; Respondent: Andreas Huyssen
- Helene Nymann (Malmø Art Academy): “Ars Memoria – Memorative Art from Ancient Times to Modern Life”
Friday, 8 September 2017
9:30 – 10:45: Keynote 2: Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz): “Frames of Transmission”
10:45 – 11:00: Break
11:00 – 12:30: Panel 4: Photography and Memory
Chair: Silvana Mandolessi; Respondent: Hans Lauge Hansen
- Daniella Wurst (Columbia University): “Breaking the Frames of the Past: Photography as Screen, Photography as Mirror”
- Annika Toots (Estonian Academy of Arts): “Then and Now: Shifting Memories of the Soviet Past in Estonian Photographic Art”
- Sophie Opitz (Goethe University): “A Kurdish Mosaic – The Photographic Archive as Encounter and Initiator”
12:30 – 13:30: Lunch
13:30 – 15:00: Panel 5: War and Memory
Chair: Pavan K. Malreddy; Respondent: Wulf Kansteiner
- Samantha Oliver (University of Pennsylvania): “The Politics of Cold War Victimhood: The Politics, Aesthetics and Rhetoric of the U.S. and Canadian Memorials to the Victims of Communism”
- Jacco Visser (Aarhus University): “The Transnational Politics of a Bangladeshi War Hero: Unveiling a Bust of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in East-London”
- Juliane Bockwoldt (Arctic University of Norway): “Memory Potentials in Documentaries”
15:00 – 15:45: Break and Book Launch
15:45 – 17:15: Panel 6: Postconflict Memory
Chair: Brett Kaplan; Respondent: Rick Crownshaw
- Manuela Badilla Rajevic (New School for Social Research): “Ephemeral Mnemonic Assemblages in Post-Dictatorship Chile: A Radical Turn in the Construction of Public Memory”
- Martin Zicari (KU Leuven): “Performance Mnemonics: The ‘Siluetazo’ as a Transnational and Transgenerational Device for Remembering the Disappeared”
- Aleksandra Kubica (King’s College London): “Mobilizing the Neglected Memories of Multicultural Pasts in Polish Memoryscapes: How Does the Local Politics Interact with the Intervention of POLIN’s Travelling Exhibition?”
Saturday, 9 September 2017
9:30 – 10:45: Keynote 3: Anna Reading (King’s College London): “The Anti-Social Life of Memory”
10:45 – 11:00: Break
11:00 – 12:30: Panel 7: Memory, Gender, and the Postcolonial
Chair: Jessica Ortner; Respondent: Anna Reading
- Sophie van der Elzen (University of Utrecht): “‘It Wasn’t the Slaves Who Liberated the Slaves’: Forging Global Liberation Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movements”
- Maninder Dhillon (University of Utrecht): “Sati in Colonial Britain: Tracing the Path of Sati’s ‘Afterlife’ in English Culture, 1850-1860”
- Noni Carter (Columbia University): “The Medusa Complex: Contending with wound as subjectivity in Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé“
12:30 – 13:00: (Short) Lunch
13:00 – 14:30: Panel 8: Near and Middle Eastern Constellations of Gender and Memory
Chair: John Njenga Karugia; Respondent: Jessica Rapson
- Sara Mousazadeh (York University): “Between the Line of Silence and Hypermemorialization: Understanding the Dynamics of Cultural Memory in Contemporary Iran”
- Dilara Çalışkan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign): “TransMemory: Disidentificatory Practices of Kinship and Re(f)using Family Time”
- Rania Said (Binghampton University): “The Regional and Global Reception of Women Testimonies of the Arab Uprisings (2010-)”
14:30 – 15:00: Closing Remarks
Local organizers: Mnemonics 2017 will be hosted by the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, which is an initiative of the Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre. Both are located at Goethe University Frankfurt. Organizers are Astrid Erll, professor at the Institute for England and America Studies at Goethe University, Erin Högerle and Jarula M. I. Wegner, PhD candidates on the DFG research project “Migration and Transcultural Memory: Literature, Film the ‘Social Life’ of Memory Media”.
