dMSA: Careers in Memory Studies

dMSA: Careers in Memory Studies


Wednesday 17 March 2021, 5 p.m. – 6.30 p.m. CET
Please register via this link: https://ugent-be.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrf-yhpzopHNLHh64Tk-S_xfCn3e2UBQA0
The event will also be livestreamed on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sXTcZ9GZ6dA

Video recording available here: https://ugent-be.zoom.us/rec/play/5JFkz6vXxMk5IWgm7RbMp2Ey2tK2ry4D77j5xOxlSGUZ8BNfw6s5mB0xwQ9RXUxXGnrruvsGdeaa6D4U.sDsD7RIMiHvEEJnk

How to go about building a career in memory studies? This interactive event will give graduate students and early career researchers an opportunity to pick the brains of a geographically and disciplinarily diverse panel of more experienced scholars, who will share do’s and don’ts, tricks of the trade and pitfalls to avoid.

  • Miguel Cardina (CES, University of Coimbra; history)
  • Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster University; English and cultural studies)
  • Susannah Eckersley (University of Newcastle; museum and heritage studies, cultural studies)
  • Jeremy F. Walton (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity; anthropology)
  • Jessica K. Young (New College Florida; literary studies)
  • Magdalena Zolkos (Australian Catholic University / Goethe University Frankfurt; political science)

Convened by Stef Craps (Ghent University / MSA Executive Committee)

Miguel Cardina is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is currently coordinating the project “Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence: The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times” (CROME), sponsored by the European Research Council. CROME’s main objective is to produce a history of the memory of the colonial-liberation wars fought by the Portuguese state and the pro-independence African movements. Cardina is the author or co-author of several books, book chapters, and papers on colonialism and anticolonialism; political ideologies in the sixties and seventies; and the dynamics between history and memory. His recent academic work, focused on Portugal and on the former African Portuguese colonies, contributes to the ongoing conceptual and epistemological discussions in the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies regarding the debates about memory historicisations, memory in the public space, and between politics, power, and representations.

Chandrima Chakraborty is University Scholar and Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Director of Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. She specializes in the literatures and cultures of South Asia and its diaspora, with a focus on history, nationalism, and public memory. Publications include Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015), and the co-edited anthology Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning (2017). Her current research involves creating a memory archive on the 1985 Air India bombing at McMaster Library, for which she is conducting interviews with and collecting artefacts from families of those who lost loved ones on AI Flight 182, and collaborating with creative artists working on remembrances of the Air India bombings. She is also conducting research on the relation between race and the current global pandemic focusing on Asian Canadians and Indian Muslims.

Susannah Eckersley is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Heritage at Newcastle University, UK; Associated Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam; and co-editor of the Routledge book series “Critical Heritages of Europe”. Her research focus is interdisciplinary, with specialisms in identities, contested belonging, and populism; memory and difficult histories; migration, diversity, and representation. Susannah’s research focuses on the ways these issues are represented, reflected, or neglected in museums and heritage, in commemorations and protests, and in the politics of heritage and memory. She leads the collaborative research project En/Counter/Points: (Re)Negotiating Belonging through Culture and Contact in Public Space and Place (funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) from 2019-2022). Previously she was the deputy project co-ordinator of CoHERE: Critical Heritages – Performing and Representing Identities in Europe (funded by European Commission Horizon 2020 from 2016-2019) and a researcher on the European Commission FP7 project MeLA: European Museums in an Age of Migrations (2011-2015). She has recently co-edited Dimensions of European Heritage and Memory (Routledge, 2019).

Jeremy F. Walton is a cultural anthropologist whose research resides at the intersection of memory studies, urban studies, and the comparative study of empires and imperialism. He leads the research group “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Prior to his current position, he held research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and New York University’s Religious Studies Program. In late 2021 or early 2022, he will inaugurate the research group REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation at the University of Rijeka, with support from a European Research Council consolidator grant. Dr. Walton’s first monograph, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford UP, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. He is also the co-editor of several volumes, including Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (U of Chicago P, 2010) and Art and Politics in the Modern Period (U of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2019).

Jessica K. Young is an Assistant Professor of Global English at New College of Florida. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, where she founded the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group and co-edited, with Michael Rothberg, Days and Memory, the blog of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. In 2018, she was a Visiting Graduate Researcher at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has been published in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies.

Magdalena Zolkos — Ph.D., Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt at Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, and formerly Senior Lecturer at Australian Catholic University at the Institute for Social Justice. Her expertise include psychoanalysis, trauma theory, affect theory, witnessing, and testimony. She is the author of Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kértesz (Bloomsbury, 2010).