Abstracts Archive

In this study we analyse how direct and indirect social contacts affect the memory of ethnic minorities (Jewish and German) in post-migration local communities. The intergroup contact theory says that social relations reduce prejudice and have a positive effect on integration. Starting from the theo...

In 1900, a so-called fusgeyer phenomenon was the most salient characteristic of Jewish emigration from Romania, given the high number of impoverished, desperate Jews who were on the brink of starvation and started to go on foot in the attempt to leave the country primarily towards the U.S. and Canad...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, "revisionist" museums about the Soviet era were eventually opened in many post-Soviet countries, showing off newly established tendencies in memory politics against the recent past. The narrative of a Soviet "occupation" played the ...

Memory Studies primarily focuses on the period within living memory, from World War 2 onwards. This paper argues that its frameworks are just as relevant to earlier periods, and that in nineteenth-century contemporary-history-writing we see representations of the recent past as history in ways that ...

After decades of interruption and stagnation in Mao's era, the Chinese memory studies, together with sociology and anthropology, was finally reborn in the "reform and opening up" period since the 1980s. Based on an overview of major sociological and historical journals and books in Chinese, this pap...

This paper concentrates on Holocaust-remembrance within a Jewish-Norwegian context. It discusses how monuments and museums become sites for identity work for the third generation, Jewish grandchildren of Holocaust-survivors living in Norway. How do bonds to different, and yet entangled, mnemonic com...

The paper proposes an introduction of the methodology of literary studies into memory studies. Habitually, traditional disciplines such as literary studies tend to adapt to intersectional, interdisciplinary fields such as memory studies, borrowing concepts and theories, and this is why my proposal m...

Due to the inevitable and imminent passing of the Holocaust survivor generation, several digital projects have emerged hoping to preserve testimony in what Amanda Lagerkvist (2017) terms the 'digital afterlife'. Moreover, advancements in technology are enabling us to re-examine traditional m...

In the summer of 2015 central Europe experienced a drought that led major rivers such as the Wisła to recede to their lowest levels for centuries. The result of anthropogenic climate change, the drought, inline with a 60 year trend in lowering summer river levels, performed an unexpected archaeolog...

During an interview discussing histories of mass violence, author W.G. Sebald claimed that "the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation." Read in the context of his 1995 novel, The Rings of Saturn, this...

At the end of World War II, northern part of the German province East Prussia became part of the Soviet Union. Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad, the German population was removed from the region, the development and appropriation of cultural space began. The formed politics of memory, the main sl...

In the years since 1990 Lithuania's philosophical community faced the need to reflect on its Soviet past and legacy. Naturally, this period in the history of Lithuanian philosophy has seen some insightful academical research, but it still mostly remains constrained to the genre of memoirs and ap...

The early modern and renaissance cabinets of curiosities in rich homes across Europe gave life to modern institutional museums. Today, fascinated by the poetics of the ordinary and equipped with a memory studies lens, we observe our own familiar bookshelves and cupboards – these new cabinets of cu...

This paper is dedicated to analysis of narration practices about Jews in Polish cinema in 1960-1989. This period includes several significant events in cultural, political and social life: the dawn of the Polish film school; political crisis and policy of anti-semitism in 1968-1971; victory of Solid...

Holocaust Memory as a universalized model of proper memory and its global reach has been discussed widely in memory studies, most notably in the concept of cosmopolitan memory (Levy and Sznaider 2002) and multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009). This paper departs from the Levi's and Rothberg...

Catholic Church is an important mnemonic actor, the role of whom is rarely discussed by researchers of collective memory. Poland is an illustrative case of a European country where the socio-political position of the Church remains firm and influential. After the collapse of the communist regime, th...

Imperial archives are acknowledged curated and contested spaces. While a number of scholars have interrogated the role of memory and the archive, fewer interrogated the ability of one regional space to influence the archive and mnemonic production of another within the same archive. Politics in the ...