Roundtable Discussion on the Futures of Culture Memory Studies

This concluding roundtable discussion featuring Andreas Langenohl, Ansgar Nünning, Astrid Erll, Horst Carl and Vjeran Pavlakovic will offer a forum for broader reflection on the themes of the symposium and the place of memory studies in the study of culture. The discussion will reflect on the legacies of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) Erinnerungskulturen, or Collaborative Research Centre on Cultures of Memory, founded in 1997 at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, which set out to intensify and broaden the study of memory, emphasizing above all “the plurality of cultural memory” (Erll 2011, 49). Like the entire two-day event, the roundtable will reflect on developments in the past twenty years, on the current state of memory studies and its possible futures in a changing academic, cultural and social landscape.. In this respect, it is a particular highlight that the symposium invites some of the initiators of the SFB Erinnerungskulturen and new experts to continue the “thorough historicization of the category of memory” (Erstantrag, p. 11) and to reflect on the development of memory studies in past, present and future.