This symposium sets out to explore the productive tensions between forgetting and remembering and their effects on culture.

Preserving and handing down history and its influence on the cultural memory of modern societies is the conventional provenance of the humanities scholarship. At the same time, the construction of any historical narrative assumes the erasure of any competing narrative, an erasure that is forgetting.

If we assume that cultural memory is built upon suppression and forgetting, then memory as a personal and collective reality implies that the past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory.

We may thus challenge the assumption that cultural identity is about creating a narrative on one’s own place in history and what happened in the past: it might rather be that what cultures treasure as memory is important for identity formation as much as what it is forgotten.

We welcome presenters from any areas of the humanities and the possible fields of research may relate to:

• The role of power in constructing memory (censorship and canon/ dissent and subversion)

• Redemption as ‘citability’ of one’s own past (narratives of personal and national identities)

• Digital memory and identities (avatars, role play games, cosplay)

• Gendered memory

• Archives as repositories of memory (genealogy, journalism, new media)

• Contested memories (subalternity, gender issues)

• Memory and progress

• Performative memories (commemorations, re-enactments)

• Counterfactual memories (authentic vs fictional memory)

• History and historiography

• Anthropocene and post-human re-inscription of memory (systematic memory, automatic memory)

• Psychoanalysis (memory, trauma, remembering violence)

• Memory and the philosophical subject

• Non-verbal memory transmission (visual communication, imitation, animal behaviour)

• Translating memory



We particularly encourage papers which bring together more than one of these areas, and entail inter-disciplinary research in postgraduate work.