Astrid Erll and William Hirst (eds.). Cognition, Culture, and Political Momentum: Breaking Down the Silos in Collective Memory Research. Oxford University Press, 2025.
This collection of essays aims at breaking down the silos in multidisciplinary research on collective memory. Edited by a cognitive psychologist and a scholar of literature, culture, and media, it brings together diverse disciplines working on memory in the space between cognition and culture—from cognitive, social, and cultural psychology to psychoanalysis, history, literary history, media studies, sociology, and the big data sciences. The book offers concise chapters written in a highly accessible style by leading experts in the field of memory studies. It is arranged into seven sections, each showcasing existent work on a key topic of collective memory research: memory across the mind and the wild; generation and memory; national and transnational memory; narrative, emotion, and memory; media and big data; conflict and commemorative culture; future thinking and transformative memory. Each chapter makes explicit its disciplinary background assumptions, methods, aims, and open questions, thereby underscoring both the potentials of different types of memory research as well as their limitations. This volume offers a foundation on which to build bridges between the silos that the many disciplines studying memory still occupy, preparing the ground for greater interdisciplinarity in memory studies.