Abstracts Archive

After the Euromaidan and subsequent Russian occupation of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas, Ukraine has left the Russian political orbit. The new government introduced amendments to the Ukrainian Constitution that set forth a strategic course for acquiring membership in the EU and NATO. Consequen...

Memorials have become increasingly relevant in societies seeking to come to terms with the past of mass violence, and there is a growing body of academic scholarship that scrutinises the politics of memory in divided societies. This paper takes a different approach to the politics of memorials: it d...

This presentation discusses the commemorations of the Armenian genocide in relation to the burgeoning literature on transnational and European memories. Even though transnational studies of remembrance shed significant light on how movements caused by wars, mass atrocities, slavery, colonialism, imm...

The majority of memory studies have situated European memory coordinates between the Holocaust, the Stalinist Gulag and Communist repression. Our study expands the conceptual and empirical focus beyond the common juxtaposition of Holocaust versus Gulag (and by extension Nazism and Stalinism) paradig...

This paper utilises Pierre Nora's term lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) to situate two Parisian geographical sites – the former internment camp at Drancy and the memorial at the site of the former Vel d'Hiv – within the wider realm of memory studies. By using these sites as case studies to e...

The last years have seen on those territories that were occupied by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War increasing activities to remove, transpose or transform Soviet war memorials. Whereas the Tallinn "Bronze Soldier" has been surely the most prominent case, not least due to the riots ...

The proposed paper would deal with the ongoing Georgian-Russian conflict and how it is represented and cultivated in the Georgian national narrative. However, Russian interpretation of the same phenomena and events will be also illustrated and analyzed. Particularly, the presentation will focus on ...

As Freudian psychoanalysis described it, oblivion is neither a malfunction or a gap of memory but an active process of erasement related with repression. Based on memory studies that specifically take forgetting as a topic (Loraux, Ferro, Heinrich, Guenée), this paper will consider such oblivions a...

This paper is concerned with what I would like to call provincial memory. A century ago Northern Ireland was established as a statelet (also commonly referred to as the Province) within the United Kingdom; meanwhile, in Upper Silesia, a Plebiscite was held to determine the national identifications ...

Material culture is arguably one of the most significant disciplines in shaping the future of Holocaust memory and museum studies, for which much scholarship exists. Yet, there is still much research to be done concerning the concept of home, internment and displacement in the memory of Holocaust su...

The aim of the paper is to discuss the specificity of Central and Eastern European cult of heroes. Because of frequent reshaping of political narrations following major historical turning points (the Second World War and the changes of ruling political ideologies), the cult in this region developed ...

The gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century, culminated in the violent delineation of new borders and the re-emergence of until then dormant national identities at the Empire's western territories, which today are frequently referred to as 'The Balkans'. In the last two...

EUGENIJUS ŽMUIDAThe „Lost" and The „Born" Generations: two types of Memories on the WWI and a short comparison of Western and Eastern Great War literature The Great War was not only the first modern war (in terms of technology) in the history of mankind but also the War involving the greatest ...

In 2020, Rwanda commemorated the 26th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi which resulted in the slaughter of over 800,000 people in approximately 100 days. A few literary texts in response to the horrors of 1994 have since been published yet relatively few by Rwandan authors. Gilbert Gator...

Like many other Polish cities Lwów had a big Jewish community that almost disappeared after WWII. The paper engages with commemorative practices dedicated to the Jewish past of the city in contemporary Lviv. The commemorations carried out by the Jewish community are still strongly rooted in t...

If we use the definition of Kai Erikson, we can argue that the arrival of the communists to power in Central and Eastern Europe provoked a cultural trauma. According to Erikson, a cultural trauma is "a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impa...

In the works of the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, one can see a certain preoccupation with the issues of World War II, for instance an examination of the way in which the country negotiated the highly significant and politicised issues and ideologies at stake in the run up to the conflict and i...

In 1982, the performance artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951−1982) published the autobiographical text Dictee.;Cha emigrated from South Korea with her family in 1961 because of the post-war military government's repressive policies under Syngman Rhee following the April 19 Movement (also ca...

W.G. Sebald's enigmatic novel Austerlitz presents a survivor's narrative of the eponymous Jacque Austerlitz, a man whose search for his past and identity takes the reader on a journey that transcends time, space, and medium. As a young Jewish boy in 1939, Austerlitz was rescued from Naz...

My paper will present the outcomes of a recent empirical survey conducted with two generations in the present‑day Czech Republic. The first generation lived the majority of their lives under the Communist regime while the second generation was born after the fall of Communism. The analysis reveale...

The aim of the paper is to identify main topics and patterns of description and analysis adopted in recent studies dedicated to the memory/-ies in Istria. The region in question is a peninsula situated in Slovenia and Croatia, previously being a part of Austria-Hungary, Italy, and finally Yugoslavia...

In my paper I wish to examine a specific position of the Polish bystander of the Holocaust – the position of a voyeur. Recent literature focuses particularly on the concept of the bystanders, in Polish context especially, within the frame of the social and economic benefits derived from the Holoca...

Being on the periphery of a country's official memory culture tends to not be perceived positively. "Memory actors" often want "sites of memory" to be built in significant economic and transportation locations to not only highlight their importance, but to also magnify the structure's importance. In...