PRESIDENT

Sarah Gensburger is a research full professor in social sciences at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She works at the intersection of memory studies, public policy analysis and micro-history. Her dissertation in sociology aimed at putting Halbwachs theory to the empirical test. Her habilitation introduced mainstream political science into memory studies.
She has also been exploring new ways to practice memory studies, also reaching beyond academia: by using blogs, podcasts and collaborative projects. Her most recent books include Beyond Memory. Can we really learn from the past? (with S. Lefranc, Palgrave, 2020, also in French and Arabic) and Memory on my doorstep. Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (LUP, 2019). In 2021, she was elected President of the Memory Studies Association.
More on https://www.sarahgensburger.com

PRESIDENT-ELECT

Wulf Kansteiner is Professor of Memory Studies and Historical Theory at Aarhus University in Denmark. He studied at UCLA and Ruhr University Bochum and was for 15 years a faculty member at Binghamton University (SUNY). Kansteiner’s work addresses four overarching themes:

— the methods and theories of memory studies
— the role of visual media — TV, film, digital culture — in the formation of cultural memory
— post-narrativist historical theory
— Holocaust history, memory & historiography
— Contemporary European and especially contemporary German history

Kansteiner is co-founder and co-editor of the Sage-journal Memory Studies. He served on the executive committee of the MSA from 2017 through 2019 and is a member of the advisory board of the MSA, Mnemonics, the International Network for the Theory of History, and the Leibniz Research Consortium Value of the Past, among others. He is a member of the editorial board of the DeGruyter series Media and Cultural Memory and the Cambridge UP journal Memory, Mind & Media.

PAST-PRESIDENTS

Aline Sierp is Associate Professor in European Studies at Maastricht University (NL). She holds a PhD in Comparative European Politics and History from the University of Siena (IT). Her research interests cover collective memory, questions of identity and European integration. Before joining the University of Maastricht, Aline Sierp worked as researcher at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (DE). She is the author of History, Memory and Transeuropean Identity: Unifying Divisions (Routledge, 2014), co-editor (with C. Karner) of Dividing United Europe: From Crisis to Fragmentation (Routledge, 2019) and of Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Berghahn, 2020, with J. Wüstenberg).

For more details, see: https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/aline.sierp

Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies at The Nottingham Trent University (UK). After receiving her PhD in Government & Politics from the University of Maryland, Jenny worked at the School of International Service at American University, at the Free University of Berlin, for the Independent Academic Commission at the Federal Ministry of Justice for the Critical Study of the National Socialist Past, and York University in Toronto. She is the author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Yifat Gutman) of the Handbook of Memory Activism (forthcoming).

Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia, and Sociology Department Chair. He received a B.A. with High Honors from Swarthmore College (1986)  and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale (1993). While he has published on a wide variety of topics, his interests to date have focused particularly on collective memory, critical theory, transitional justice, and postwar Germany.  Current projects include on-going work on these topics, as well as editing a six-volume Cultural History of Memory and developing the outlines of “tragic sociology,” an approach with origins in Nietzsche’s writings on suffering and Weber’s sociological approach to theodicy.  He works with students on collective memory, sociological theory, symbolic politics, and history and theory of ideas and meanings, among other topics.

For more information, see https://sociology.virginia.edu/people/faculty/jeffrey-olick

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Jelena Đureinović is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Giessen. Her current research project combines the approaches of transnational history and memory studies and explores the role of memory in the context of networks of solidarity in the global Cold War and decolonisation setting, focusing on the agency of Yugoslav war veterans. She is also interested in the memory work of the far-right and specificities of memory politics in contemporary authoritarian democracies.
Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution (Routledge, 2020) centres on the question of how memory politics works, investigating the radical revision of the Second World War in post-Yugoslav Serbia. She developed the Memory Activism Programme at the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, where she is still involved in providing strategic direction.

More on: https://transformations.univie.ac.at/en/members-and-projects/jelena-dureinovic/

Catherine Gilbert is an Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests span postcolonial African literatures and cultures, with a particular focus on cultural memory, trauma and narrative. Her current project examines genocide commemoration and education in the Rwandan diaspora, working with communities in Belgium, France and the UK to explore questions of locatedness and the intergenerational transmission of memory. Her first monograph, From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (Pulm, 2018), received the Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award in 2019. She has recently co-edited, with Kate McLoughlin and Niall Munro, the volume On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Remembering War (Peter Lang, 2020).

For more information, see: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/our-people/profile/catherinegilbert.html

Sang-Hyun Kim is associate professor at the Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Korea. He holds a D.Phil. in chemistry from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Kim’s research has focused on the intersections between history and sociology of science, environmental history, and intellectual history of development. His recent research interests extend to the analysis of the imaginaries and experiences of growth-oriented, technocratic development and modernization as key discursive and material sites of memory conflicts. His publications include: Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (co-edited with Sheila Jasanoff, University of Chicago Press, 2015); “Science, Technology, and the Imaginaries of Development in South Korea” (2017); “Korean Ecumenical Movement and the Politics of ‘Modernization’ and ‘Development’ during the 1960s and early 1970s” (2019).

Maria Kobielska, PhD, is a memory scholar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, co-founder of the Research Center for Memory Cultures, member of the MSA since its beginning in Amsterdam 2016. She worked in research teams carrying out international and Polish grant projects (like TRACES: Transmitting Contentious Heritage with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-production, Horizon 2020) and was awarded as outstanding young scholar by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and by the Foundation for Polish Science. Her most recent book in Polish discusses Polish memory culture in the 21st century and she is currently leading a research project that focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums. She has written in English, among others, on cultural memory of the Katyn crime and of the 1980s in Poland, on Polish museum boom, its narrative dominants and public controversies.

Johanna Vollmeyer is a research associate at Complutense University in Madrid. She holds a Phd from the department of German Studies and an M.A. degree in German Studies, Journalism and Political Science (Universität Leipzig). Her doctoral thesis engages with the motif of the enemy brothers as representatives of competing memory discourses in the Spanish and German literature of the 20th century. During her doctoral studies she was a member of the Phd-Net “(Kon)figurationen des interkulturellen Wissens” ((Con)figurations of intercultural knowledge), a binational promotional program of Humboldt-University Berlin and Complutense University Madrid. In 2019 she was one of the co-organizers of the Annual Memory Studies conference and co-editor of the Memory Studies Special Issue 2020. Her current research focuses on cultural recycling in the postdigital age. She is a member of the research group REC-Lit: Cultural Recycling: Transliterature in the Postdigital Age (Ref: RTI2018-094607-B-I00).

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska is a cultural scholar and sociologist. Her research focus is on cultural memory and visual history in Poland and Germany. Currently, she works on a project on the infrastructures of mediatized memories. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 at the University of Lodz and completed her habilitation in 2016 at the University of Warsaw. Since 2008 Magdalena has been assistant professor at the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Lodz. From 2010 to 2015, she coordinated the project “Modi Memorandi. Lexicon of Memory Culture” (in Polish) at the Center for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Since 2015, she has been a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw. From 2018 to 2020, she was a visiting professor and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz. She is the Ambassador Scientist of the Humboldt Foundation in Poland. Her contributions include articles in “German Studies Review”, “The Public Historian” and “Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies”. She published four monographs in Polish and German, edited ten collected volumes and authored more than fifty articles and chapters which appeared in Polish, German, English, Ukrainian and Croatian. Magdalena attaches great importance to academic transfer which is why she published numerous Polish translations of international literature in memory studies and visual history.

ASSISTANTS

At the moment the Memory Studies Association is transitioning between assistants.

INTERNS

Clarissa Bigasz Mascarenhas is a research master’s student in European Studies at Maastricht University specialising in Histories of European Integration. She holds a BA in International Relations from Laureate International Universities – Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, and her interests include memory of Europe and global history and memory.

Winona Sophie Kamphausen is a research master’s student for European Studies at the University Maastricht (Netherlands). She has obtained her Bachelor’s at the University of Göttingen (Germany) in political science and social and economic history. Her research interests include memory, history especially European Integration and Women’s history, and climate change.

ADVISORY BOARD

Sakiru Adebayo (University of the Witwatersrand)
Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University)
Silke Arnold-de Simine (University of London)
Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz)
Jonathan Bach (New School)
Ruramisai Charumbira (University of Western Ontario)
Stef Craps (Ghent University)
Fionnuala Dillane (University College Dublin)
Astrid Erll (University of Frankfurt)
Francisco Ferrándiz (CSIC)
Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University)
William Hirst (New School for Social Research)
Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow)
Marije Hristova (University of Warwick)
Siobhan Kattago (University of Tartu)
Erica Lehrer (Concordia University)
Daniel Levy (Stony Brook University)
Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University)
MemoriAL Group – Interdisciplinary Latin American Memory Research Network (Lena Voigtländer)
Jocelyn S. Martin (Ateneo de Manila University)

Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt University Berlin)
Wayne Modest (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Dirk Moses (University of North Carolina)
Klaus Neumann (Hamburger Institut zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur)
Jessica Ortner (University of Copenhagen)
Olivette Otele (University of Bristol)
Avishek Parui (Indian Institute of Technology Madras)
Emilie Pine (University College Dublin)
Susannah Radstone (University of South Australia & Monash University)
Anna Reading (King’s College London)
Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
Michael Rothberg (University of California, Los Angeles)
Ihab Saloul (University of Amsterdam)
Alicia Salomone (Universidad de Chile)
Tea Sindbæk Andersen (University of Copenhagen)
Hanna Teichler (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Barbara Törnquist Plewa (Lund University)
Rebekah Vince (Queen Anne University London)
Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw)
Jay Winter (Yale University)

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