The Connecting Memories Podcast

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz). Prof Assmann presents a talk entitled ‘History, Memory and Narrative’. In her talk and in the discussion that follows, she examines national histories and explores the potential of 'shared symbolic recognition' to work towards repair in cases where an element of a nation’s past has caused historical wounds. 

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Ruramisai Charumbira (Western University). Prof Charumbira presents a talk entitled ‘Towards Ecologies of Memory and Ecological Memories’. In her talk and in the discussion that follows, she identifies the relational ontology of the more-than-human in Southern African Praise Poetry, and traces a genealogy of misrecognition of African and other indigenous ecologies of relation in Western intellectual history. 

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Jenny Wüstenberg (Nottingham Trent University). Prof Wüstenberg presents a talk entitled ‘Slow Memory: Remembering Gradual Change in an Accelerating World’. In her talk and in the discussion that follows, she presents her concept of ‘slow memory’ and explores how we might better register and remember slow-moving developments, given that our existing tools for remembering are overwhelmingly designed for remembering eventful history. 

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Helen Finch (University of Leeds). Prof Finch presents a talk entitled ‘Queer Memory, Queer Poetics’. In her talk and in the discussion that follows, she explores queer memory as a means to serve queer history and queer mnemic techniques as a kind of fugitive practice conducive to breaking down normative modes of time and escaping oppressive logics.

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Mihaela Mihai (University of Edinburgh). Prof Mihai presents a talk entitled ‘Critique as Political Care: Democracy, Memory, Theory’. In her talk and in the discussion that follows, she explores how particular interpretations of the past become accepted as 'self-evident truths' and how critical interventions within the mnemonic field can be understood as a form of political care for a society's democracy.

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Peter Davies (University of Edinburgh). Prof Davies presents a talk entitled ‘The Holocaust and Translation: a Complex Relationship’. In his talk and in the discussion that follows, Prof Davies thinks about the Holocaust as an essentially multilingual event, considering both the role of translation during the Holocaust and the all-important contribution of translators and interpreters to the memory of the Holocaust.

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Michael Rothberg (University of California, Los Angeles). Prof Rothberg presents a talk entitled ‘Debating Holocaust Memory: The Politics of Comparison in Contemporary Germany’ and we discuss the ethics of Holocaust comparisons, Holocaust memory in a postmigrant society, and the recent public debate in Germany known as the Historikerstreit 2.0 (Historians’ Dispute 2.0).

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Katharina Niemeyer (Université du Québec à Montréal). Prof Niemeyer presents a talk entitled ‘The Power of Nostalgia’. In her talk and in the discussion that follows, Prof Niemeyer talks about the wide range of scholarly approaches to the idea of nostalgia, its ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ forms, as well as technostalgia, and retro and vintage objects.

The guest speaker for this episode is Prof Max Silverman (University of Leeds). Prof Silverman presents a talk entitled ‘Impure Memory’ and we discuss the links between memory and identity, the idea that memory is never pure, and the crucial contribution of art to memory cultures.

The guest speaker for this episode is Dr László Muntean (Radboud University Nijmegen). Dr Muntean presents a talk entitled ‘Memory and Materiality: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center’. In his talk and in the discussion that follows, Dr Muntean thinks about memory materially, charting what subsequently happened to certain of the material remains of the World Trade Center and considering some of the ethical issues surrounding these ‘afterlives’.