RA 1 - Cultural Memory

On the agenda for the meeting is:

• The election of two new speakers – please contact Paul Vickers if you would like to stand

• Establishing ideas for RA sessions during this coming semester – so ideas for readings, formats, guest speakers – formal and informal (so as part of the masterclass/workshop format or informal invitation to join one RA meeting), other events and collaborations in the upcoming semesters. Please see the links and information below for some ideas on how to get a grasp of what is happening in and around memory studies at the moment and what might make for fruitful themes for discussion.

• A proposal from the Herder Institute in Marburg to have a workshop/masterclass with Katja Wezel, DAAD visiting professor in Pittsburgh, on the concepts and theories involved in exploring transitional justice, working through the past, memory politics/history politics, conflicts and victimhood. Her work has looked at Latvia, but any masterclass would go beyond a focus on one country to look more broadly at the issues around transitional justice. More information is available here: http://www.history.pitt.edu/people/katja-wezel. Please consider if you are interested in this idea and whether you would like the RA to support it and co-organize it with the Herder Institute.

• We also received an offer to host a film screening through the RA on the destruction of heritage. This is from that email:

“I am writing about our new documentary film, 'The Destruction of Memory',

which looks at the urgent issue of cultural destruction. The film includes

interviews with the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the ICC,

as well as many international experts across various disciplines.

The film's website is here http://destructionofmemoryfilm.com/

We've been screening in various types of contexts, including museums and

universities such as the British Museum and at Harvard, over recent weeks,

and I'm exploring other screening bookings for the fall and beyond. I

thought such a screening could interest The Study of Culture at the

Graduate Centre.”

The questions addressed in the film, and how they addressed, are controversial since it pitches a Western-centred epistemology of heritage and memory into a different cultural and political context. Please read up on the film and think if you would like the RA to be involved in any way. Or whether, perhaps, the issues addressed in the discourse around the film and heritage destruction could inspire the work of the RA.

For those of you new to the field and the themes, please follow some of the following links to get an idea of what is current in the field of memory studies and surrounding disciplines, as this might give you some ideas not only for what to discuss in the RA sessions but also on how the RA themes might be effectively linked to your own research.

https://networks.h-net.org/h-memory - information on events, publications and mailing list

http://www.memorystudies-frankfurt.com/networks/ links to various memory studies networks and associations, as well as the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform itself

http://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/ a new network for memory studies

http://mss.sagepub.com/ Memory Studies – the journal

https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/71 Memory and History - the journal

https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/19923 De Gruyter media and cultural memory series

http://www.palgrave.com/de/series/14682 Palgrave memory studies series