PostDoc Symposium: Astrid Erll : New Directions and Challenges in Cultural Memory Studies: Past, Present, Future

Showcasing PhD candidates’ and postdocs’ research, the five panels will discuss cultural memory in relation to postcolonial studies and reconciliation, institutions, literature, film, and digital media. Rather than offer narrow perspectives on particular topics or regions, the symposium highlights the entangled inter- and multidisciplinary concerns both in memory studies’ more established foci as well as in the field’s more recent developments. The participants’ papers show how both the colonial and socialist pasts continue to influence the present, while institutions continue to provide a conflicted and contested foundation of memory cultures. Mass media, such as literature, film and digital ones, are explored in their role as important mediators between diverse publics and audiences, on the one hand, and political and institutional actors on the other. The diversity of the papers provides a global and transnational perspective enabling detailed investigation of how both historically and in the twenty-first century memory processes are negotiated in various cultural contexts.

Programme: New Directions and Challenges in Cultural Memory Studies: Past, Present, Future

Tuesday 14 June

13:45     Welcome and Introduction

14:00     Symposium Panel 1: Memory and reconciliation in postcolonial and postsocialist contexts

• Nikola Baković “Bronze of Contention: Remembering Marshal Stepa Stepanović in Čačak (Serbia)”
• Hanna Teichler “Of binaries and transgressions – memory studies, performance theory and Canada’s Roadmap to Reconciliation”
• Kaya Alice de Wolff “Memory Conflicts in Postcolonial Media Cultures: Struggles for Recognition of the Genocide on Herero and Nama in the Public Media Discourse in contemporary Germany”

16:00     Symposium Panel 2: Memory and film

• Nadia Butt “Memory and Media: ‘House’ as a Realm of Memory in Pakistani Television Drama”
• Christina Jordan “A Prince Producing Memories? The Active Production of Collective Memories in Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee”
• Erin Högerle “Film Festivals and the Memory Industries”

18:00     Keynote Lecture: Prof. Astrid Erll (Frankfurt)

Wednesday 15 June

09:30     Symposium Panel 3: Memory and transnational literature

• Mirko Milivojevic “(‘Yugo’)nostalgia and cultural memory – towards alternative past(s) and present?”
• Sayma Khan “Reading South Asian Partition Literature across linguistic and temporal distance”
• Maria Elisabeth Dorr “Collapsible spaces and distant storyworlds in (trans)cultural memory studies”

11:30     Symposium Panel 4: Memory and institutions

• Dora Komnenović “Discarding a Common Past: The «Cleansing» of Croatian and Slovenian Libraries in the 1990s and Beyond”
• Sarah Czerney “Rewriting the nation’s history: subversive media strategies in museums”
• Yingjie Zhang “How much can Western memory of World War II be linked with the Eastern?”

13:00     Lunch

14:30     Symposium Panel 5: Memory and digital/new media

• Sophie-Charlotte Opitz “Framing Remembrance – Encountering Memory: A Case Study on Conceptual War Photography and its Strategy to Educate Memory Practices in Museums”
• Eva Jungbluth “Visual Memory Tropes in Graphic Narratives”
• Ana Lúcia Migowski and Willian Fernandes Araújo “‘Looking Back’ at memories on Facebook: Remembering an being remembered by digital technologies”