PRESIDENT

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.

PRESIDENT-ELECT

Joanna Wawrzyniak is associate professor of sociology and the founding director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw. She has a long standing experience in oral history and museum research. Her current projects relate to the memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation, deindustrialization, and decolonization of heritage.  Her most recent books include co-edited Remembering the Neoliberal Turn (Routledge 2023), Regions of Memory: Transnational Formations (Palgrave 2022) and co-authored Cuts: Oral History of Transformation (in Polish, Krytyka Polityczna 2020). She co-edited special issues for, among others, Memory Studies, Contemporary European History, and East European Politics and Societies. Her work was supported by grants of the European Commission and national agencies. She was a visiting scholar at the EUI (Florence), EHESS, Sorbonne and CNRS (Paris), FRIAS (Freiburg), Imre Kertesz Kolleg (Jena), Herder Institute (Marburg), NSSR (NYC), and most recently at the Newcastle University, FCC (Lahore), ECB NGO (Yerevan), and Institute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Kaunas). She is vice-Chair of the COST Action Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change. For more information see: https://crsm.uw.edu.pl/staff/dr-hab-joanna-wawrzyniak/

PAST-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

FOUNDING PRESIDENTS

Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University and the co-lead of AIMS@NTU (Advancing Interdisciplinary Memory Studies) there. Together with Aline Sierp and Jeff Olick, she was the co-founder and past Co-President of the Memory Studies Association. Currently, she is the Chair of the COST Action on “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices in Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change” (2021-25). She is the author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (Cambridge UP 2017, in German LIT Verlag/Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2020) and the forthcoming Slow Memory: Remembering Gradual Change in an Accelerating World (Oxford UP). She is co-editor, most recently, of Agency in Transnational Memory Politics(with Aline Sierp, Berghahn 2020), the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (with Yifat Gutman, 2023), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places (with Sarah Gensburger, in English with Berghahn and in French with Fayard in 2023), and a special issue of Memory Studies (December 2023, with Jeffrey Olick and Aline Sierp). Her research interests concern the contentious politics of memory, memory and democracy, slow-moving change such as biodiversity loss, and the memory of family separation policies.

Aline Sierp is Associate Professor in European History & Memory 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 contested histories, memory politics, 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). Besides being the co-founder and past co-president of the Memory Studies Association, she also co-founded and directed the Council of European Studies’ Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe. For more details, see https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/aline.sierp

 

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

Ruramisai Charumbira is an associate professor of History at Western University (Canada). She is keen to participate in transformative inclusivity within the MSA and beyond, as well as bringing indigenous studies in conversation with memory studies in matters of nature (and climate crises). She has served on the Advisory Board of the MSA and started the Memory and Nature Working Group (M&NWG) as well as the initiative on “Transformative Inclusivity.” She is the author of the monograph Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe, peer-reviewed articles, and chapters, as well as public humanities essays. She is also on the editorial advisory board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History and recently joined the editorial team of the journal Safundi. Her scholarly work can be found at: https://history.uwo.ca/people/faculty/Charumbira.html and her nature-focused poetry blog in the traditions of southern Africa can be found at: https://ruramisaicharumbira.com/blog

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

María Eugenia Ulfe is a senior professor and researcher in Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). She holds an MA in the Arts of the Americas, Oceania, and Africa at the University of East Anglia (UK, 1995) and a Ph.D. in Human Sciences at George Washington University (Washington DC, 2005). She is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga and an Honorary Professor in the School of Arts, Media, and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (2022-2027). She directs the Interdisciplinary Research Group Memory and Democracy at PUCP. And has been the Director of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Film Festival in 2020 and 2021. Among her recent publications, there is with Ximena Málaga Sabogal, Reparando Mundos: Víctimas y Estado en los Andes peruanos (PUCP, 2021), which received an Honorary award from the Peru Section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2022.

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 Holocaust non-sites of memory in terms of witnessing and commemoration, 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

Lana Đaković is an administrative manager for the Memory Studies Association located at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University (NL). She has a wide range of responsibilities that are essential for the smooth operation of the organisation. Her role includes providing communication material, secretarial tasks, advising on competitive proposals, marketing research and maintaining online presence. After receiving her MA in Art History and Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, she was teaching art history and professional art subjects at the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb, and mentoring MA students from the courses Practicum and Teaching at the Department of Art History at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.

INTERNS

Clarissa Bigasz Mascarenhas holds an MSc. in European Studies from Maastricht University, with a specialization in Histories of European Integration, and a BA in International Relations from Laureate International Universities – Rio de Janeiro/Brazil. Her interests include the memory of Europe, communication and perception studies, contested history sites, and the history of EU-Brazil and Mercosur relations.

Pablo Merayo Montes holds a BA. in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University College Maastricht and is currently an RMA History student at Utrecht University. His interests include the memory of traumatic pasts such as that of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship and the democratic history of Spain.

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)
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)
Rosanne Kennedy (ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences)
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)
Jeffrey Olick (University of Virginia)
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)
Aline Sierp (Maastricht University)
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)
Jay Winter (Yale University)
Jenny Wüstenberg (The Nottingham Trent University)

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