Ann Rigney (BA, MA University College Dublin; PhD University of Toronto) is professor at Utrecht University and holds the chair of Comparative Literature and is currently coordinator of the Universuty research area Cultures and Identities. In 2005 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Dutch Academic of Sciences (KNAW). Her research is located in the field of cultural memory studies and philosophy of history. Ever since her PhD thesis, published as The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge UP, 1990; 2002), she has been fascinated by the intersections between historical narration, fiction, and collective identities. This has led to various projects, most recently to a collaborative programme called The Dynamics of Cultural Remembrance: An Intermedial Perspective, funded by the Netherlands Research Council (2006-2011), and to the creation of an interdisciplinary platform at Utrecht on Transnational Memory.

Research fields:

Memory and Media

Transnationality

19th and 20th century memory cultures

Memory conflicts

Key Publications:

The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge UP, 1990; 2002)

Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Cornell UP, 2001; winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli award 2001)

Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam UP, 2000; with Joep Leerssen)

Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (De Gruyter, 2008; with Astrid Erll)

The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move it is scheduled to appear with Oxford University Press in March 2012

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