Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre (FZHG)
Some research questions exceed the grasp of one single discipline, and some problems only come into view once we transcend the horizon of our individual disciplines. The Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre was founded in 2010 to provide a platform for addressing such questions and for the analysis of joint topics and objects of research from a transdisciplinary angle.

Memory Studies Association (MSA)

The MSA aims to be a professional association for Memory Studies scholars, as well as those who are active in museums, memorial institutions, archives, the arts and other fields engaged in remembrance. The objective is to become the most important forum for the memory field – both through an annual, international and interdisciplinary conference and through a strong online presence.

Memory studies has grown considerably over the past decade, but does not yet have many clearly designated venues for people from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds to exchange ideas and to learn from each others’ theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches. Moreover, questions surrounding remembering are being investigated around the world, but there is too little interaction (and thus, often a lack of understanding) between various places. We hope to change this by actively identifying and inviting scholars and practitioners who are thus far underrepresented in existing scholarly networks. Finally, the MSA seeks to foster politically and civically engaged scholarship by publicly voicing concerns about political uses of the past.

Network in Transnational Memory Studies (NITMES)

The purpose of NITMES is to find new ways of conceptualising and studying cultural memory beyond the framework of the nation-state so as to provide tools for understanding identity and heritage that are better fitted to the entanglements of the contemporary world. NITMES is particularly concerned with the role of media and the arts in the emergence and dissemination of ‘travelling’ narratives and commemorative practices. Our ambition is to link these cultural processes to social mobilisation within and across national borders.

Participants: Utrecht University (Netherlands); University of Konstanz (Germany); Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany); Australian National University Canberra; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA); and University of Lund (Sweden)

(Funded by the Dutch research council [NWO] and by the participant institutions)

Balzan-Preis-Forschergruppe “Erinnerung in der Stadt rekonstruieren” (University of Konstanz)

Das europäische Gedächtnis wird oft als übernationale Erinnerung verstanden, die in einem Top-Down-Prozess geformt und überstülpt wird. Der Fokus unseres Projekts liegt jedoch auf der Dynamik des kollektiven Gedächtnisses, das von Initiativen und Bewegungen von unten geprägt ist. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf (europäischen) Städten und lokalen Akteuren, die auf neue soziale, politische und kulturelle Herausforderungen in ihrer gebauten Umwelt reagieren. Ein Grundgedanke des Projekts ist, dass Städte in einer Zeit des radikalen Wandels einen entscheidenden Kontext für die Aushandlung der Vergangenheit darstellen.

Die Fellowships werden aus Mitteln des Balzan-Preises finanziert, den Aleida und Jan Assmann 2017 für ihre Arbeit zum Kulturellen Gedächtnis erhalten haben.

https://www.exc16.uni-konstanz.de/balzan-preis-forschergruppe.html

The Memory Group at Warwick University

All graduate students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are invited to participate in the Memory Group. Memory studies has been a rapidly developing field that has brought together scholars in History, Literature, Sociology, Media and Cultural Studies and a wide range of other disciplines over the last 20 years. It is an empirically rich and theoretically challenging field that has implications for methodology and the way in which sources and data are understood across the board in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The Memory Group is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty with research interests in memory, memorialisation, and related issues of trauma and nostalgia. The group aims to meet termly with meetings involving discussion of published (both recent and older) and unpublished work and formal presentations from experts in the field.

Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature

(University of Iceland)

The Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature will provide a framework for researchers from various countries and different disciplines to engage in individual and collaborative research into various aspects of memory in literature and culture. Interest in memory studies has grown considerably in recent times, especially within the social sciences, history and, increasingly, literary studies. The field is therefore highly interdisciplinary and a crucial area of interest in literary studies and theory that offers fruitful avenues of research for scholars and students.

Irish Memory Studies Network

(University College Dublin, Humanities Institute)

From the public commemoration of historic events to private memoirs of childhood, modern culture seems obsessed with the remembrance of things past. The increasing focus on memory studies as a distinct field of research is a response to the dominance of the past in literatures and cultures. In Ireland, this is not a new phenomenon; representations of the past have always been an integral element of how the nation is imagined and framed. Given these traditions, and the particular emphasis of Irish remembrance culture on loss, how can we use the discipline of memory studies to read Irish history and culture? Can we talk of national memory and, if so, can we read it in the context of global memory banks? Should we be reading the past under the sign of trauma? And are the events of the past to be resolved through commemoration or will they – should they – remain as provocative elements of our present?
Whether discussing the recent past or more distant histories, our conversations are marked by an interrogation of what and how we remember; what and how we choose to commemorate; and what we forget.