Abstracts Archive

Survivor-historian Saul Friedländer makes a compelling case for integrating history and memory.   Yet, he refers to a continuum of public-collective memory and "'dispassionate' historical inquiries." From these two polar locations, history and memory move toward each other-seeking out the ...

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Museums have, in recent years, become increasingly aware of the sensitivities surrounding colonial photographs – especially those produced for race research. However, curatorial ethics are difficult to maintain when photos are digitised and move beyond the museum walls. This chapter examines the c...

A Professor and member of the Academy of Art in Berlin is suspended from the Academy for his Jewish origin in George Roland's movie "The Wandering Jew" from 1933. Shot in the United States in Yiddish, this movie tackles the subject of anti-Semitism in Germany head on. As the fictional Professor Artu...

The Fountain of Tears and Marian Kolodziej's Labyrinth - Memory wars and identity politics at Auschwitz.In the summer of 2019, I participated in a summer program at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum where we visited Marian's Kolodziej's haunting testimonial exhibition called the Labyrinth. It was ...

The paper focuses on how historians produce the meaning-making of Zheltoksan 1986 in post-1991 Kazakhstan. The Zheltoksan 1986 is the protest that occurred in December of 1986 in Kazakhstan initially erupted after the dismissal of Dinmiukhamed Konaev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ka...

The houses we inhabit are important containers of memory. With each new family, the house becomes a different home and these various layers of memory converge to form a dense palimpsest. Houses function quite literally as memory palaces, as a walk through a childhood home will show; each room conjur...

This study explores the temporalities of the representation of the postmemory generation on "comfort women". "Comfort women" is the euphemistic term to refer victims from all over the Asia and the Netherlands who were forced to do sexual service for soldiers and civilians attached to the military in...

In my presentation I will focus on the post-imperial memories of the Habsburg empire and their remediation in the autobiographical writings of Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday, Memoirs of a European, 1942) and Milos Crnjanski (Commentaries to Lyrics of Ithaka, 1959). I will position Stefan Zweig...

The process of constructing a society's memory is relevant to the phenomenon of migration, and the challenges it raises in places where people seek shelter, protection and recognition. Indeed, it is through a shared collective knowledge of the past that groups develop a sense of togetherness and "co...

Surveying as a method is not very popular among memory studies scholars. At the latest Memory Studies Association, very few papers were based on survey results, the same goes for the Memory Studies journal. The majority of work done in memory studies is focused on the production of memories or their...

Part of a larger research project on the complex materializations of political, terrorist violence in Europe, this paper focuses on the specific theoretical-methodological questions that arise when trying to theorize affect-filled encounters with more-than-human memorials, while trying to create a t...

This paper is about the historical memory in today's Lithuanian territory during World War I and its relation to postcolonial discourse. World War I is a very important period if we want to see many different interpretations of one base of collective memory: we can see here many completely different...

The demand for a radical decolonization of the public memory landscape received strong impetus from the much publicized '#Rhodes must fall' campaign, organized by students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2015. The removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue on the UCT upper campus was the symbol...

In recent years Latin American artistic and literary production has seen an increase in the theme of the so-called second generation related to the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone. Temporally displaced, the generations following the dictatorship, who did not have a direct experience with...

In Bernardo Kucinski's novel "K" a Polish-Jewish father living in Brazil confronts the disappearance of his daughter by the military dictatorship by relating and converging the current situation with the trauma of the Holocaust and political persecution in 1930's Europe, facing an unprecedented and ...

This paper will offer critical reflections on 'The Impossible Scene', a performance intervention in the ESMA Memory Site Museum in Buenos Aires in November 2019. This example of practice-as-research was an output of the AHRC funded project 'Staging Difficult Pasts: Of Narratives, Objects and Public ...

While their potential as powerful memory media has only recently been addressed, digital games have already contributed to the digital memory sphere and are embedded within the meaningful movements of "travelling memories" (Erll 2011). In this paper, I approach digital games as procedural experienc...

During the Second World War, around 60,000 British men and women registered as conscientious objectors, the largest number in any belligerent nation. Despite this, these individuals have largely been erased from the public consciousness as they do not fit into the dominant memory of the Second World...

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow: the phenomenon of the tech-nostalgiaOne interesting manifestation of nostalgia for the late Soviet era can be found in the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines (MSAM) in Moscow. This museum was founded in early 2007 by three young engineers from Polytechnic U...

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Gyula Flohr's life was not exceptional, nor were the historical and personal circumstances that shaped it. His story is that of an often authoritarian and hypermasculine East Central European entrepreneur who was understandably hostile towards the state. He grew up in a coal dealer Jewish family in ...

The potential applicability of Deleuzian philosophy as an approach to understand the dynamics of memorial cultures has been explored previously (e.g. Parr, 2008) - for the most part this has been done with reference to Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson's notion of time and memory as this was presen...

The commemorations of the bombing of Dresden and the Bleiburg massacre have both been sites and occasions for contesting basic facts and challenging the meanings of WWII-related events and their legacies. In the case of Dresden, far-right memory challengers in recent years have sought to reinterpret...

In WWII the Greek island of Crete was taken over by German forces through a massive paratrooper operation. After the Battle of Crete the Wehrmacht erected a monument to honor the German paratroopers in the City of Chania. After the war the monument honoring the occupator remained there, because the ...

Based on the assumption that the Holocaust has become a paradigm that has dominated the memory and genocide research and discourse in the West, I would like to try to broaden the perspective and create new possibilities for theorizing collectively traumatic events by reflecting on indigenous forms o...

There is a significant divergence in the way the International Crimes Tribunal for Bangladesh (ICT-BD) has been perceived by international and domestic audiences. The majority of western commentators have focused on issues of strict legality and have argued that the ICT-BD has failed to fulfil "inte...

In 2015, one of the most important educational reforms of Putin's day in the field of historical science in the Russian high school was implemented. In the area of Russian foreign policy, this reform was preceded by the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, while in domestic politics, this...

Why and how and to what extent do particular historical memories have the ability shaping political climate, propelling nationalist mobilization, and reproducing and (re)forming the nation, national identity and the corresponding subject formation and belonging in particular historical moments? And ...

This presentation explores how the perpetual traumas and continuous subjugations of the African diasporic subjects emerge in conjunction with their present-day intersectional oppressions. This past-present reality exposes the limits of traditional memory and trauma theories which oftentimes assume a...