CFP for Graduate Summer School Memory Unbound: Transcultural,

Transgenerational, Transmedial, and Transdisciplinary Dynamics of Memory (Ghent,

9-11/09/2013)
For the second edition of the annual summer school organized by the Mnemonics network, an international collaborative
initiative for graduate education in memory studies, we invite paper proposals from graduate students that address the
transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and/or transdisciplinary dynamics of memory.

What unites much of the most exciting research going on in the field of memory studies today is a tendency to regard
memory not as fixed but as fluid, not as static but as dynamic, not as bound but as unbound. Memory is increasingly being
seen as something that does not stay put but circulates, migrates, travels. The 2013 Mnemonics summer school will explore
this trend as it manifests itself on various levels. It will examine how memory crosses cultural, generational, medial, and
disciplinary boundaries, and how memory studies has responded, or can respond, to these mnemonic dynamics.

Whereas early work in memory studies focused on the ways in which memories are shared within particular communities
and constitute or reinforce group identity, in recent years the transcultural, transnational, and even global circulation of
memories has moved to the centre of attention. At the same time, there has been a marked increase of interest in how
memory travels between different media, and specifically in the role of digital media in the production, preservation, and
dissemination of memories. As the Holocaust begins to pass out of living memory, the question of how memories of
survivors of historical traumas are transmitted to, and inherited by, members of later generations has become another area
of intense inquiry. Furthermore, memory studies appears to be moving towards greater interdisciplinarity, or, at least,
enhanced awareness of the necessity or desirability of cross-fertilization between memory research in the humanities, social
sciences, and natural sciences.
We welcome proposals for papers that put the trans into memory studies, in the sense of exploring the manifold ways in
which memory, and the study of memory, is on the move.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. She has worked on
memories of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, British colonialism in India, and the Vietnam war. She is general
editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (de Gruyter, since 2004), co-editor of A Companion to Cultural
Memory Studies (with Ansgar Nnning, 2010), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (with Ann
Rigney, 2009), and author of Memory in Culture(2011) / Kollektives Gedchtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2005, 2nd ed.
2011), an introduction to memory studies. She is part of the editorial board of the journal Memory Studies (SAGE) and the
book series Memory Studies (Palgrave).
Susannah Radstone is Professor of Cultural Theory in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East
London. She is the author of The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (Routledge, 2007) and has edited
numerous books, including Memory and Methodology (Berg, 2000); Memory, History, Nation: The Politics of
Memory (with Katharine Hodgkin; Transaction, 2005); Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity, and Recognition (with
Katharine Hodgkin; Transaction, 2005); andMemory: Histories, Theories, Debates (with Bill Schwarz; Fordham UP,
2010). She is currently working on a monograph to be titled Getting Over Trauma and developing a research project on the
locatedness and mobility of remembering and theorizing memory.
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where he is also Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative. Affiliated with the Unit for Criticism
and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Programs in Comparative
Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust
studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literatures. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in its Cultural Memory in the
Present series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) and co-
editor with Neil Levi of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003).

Format
The Mnemonics summer school serves as an interactive forum in which junior and senior memory scholars meet in an
informal and convivial setting to discuss each others work and to reflect on new developments in the field of memory
studies. The objective is to help graduate students refine their research questions, strengthen the methodological and
theoretical underpinnings of their projects, and gain further insight into current trends in memory scholarship.
Each of the three days of the summer school will start with a scene-setting keynote lecture, followed by sessions consisting of
three graduate student papers, responses, and Q&A.
In order to foster incisive and targeted feedback, all accepted papers will be precirculated among the participants and each
presentation session will be chaired by a senior scholar (one of the keynote speakers or a faculty member from one of the
partner institutions) who will also act as respondent.
Additionally, a short reader will be compiled in consultation with the keynote speakers and made available in advance, so as
to provide participants with a shared background for the research and discussions before and during the summer school.