Call for Abstracts:

Memory Studies in Turkey and Beyond: A Handbook

Turkey with geographical, historical, social, and cultural attributes stands as a unique laboratory for memory studies. Memory studies in turn can serve as an antidote for grappling with Turkey’s past, present, and the looming issues, challenges and crisis within and beyond its borderlands. Despite such mutual benefits, there remains a notable lack of development in memory studies within Turkish academia, and a shortage of collaborative research on the Turkish memory culture in transcultural memory studies. The underrepresentation of memory studies in the Turkish context inevitably underscores the need for research initiatives that contribute to bridging this gap through comprehensive academic resources. In response, we extend an invitation with this call for contributions to an upcoming reference work titled “Memory Studies in Turkey and Beyond: A Handbook” to be published by Brill Academic Publishers as part of Brill’s Handbook Series in Memory Studies (https://brill.com/HSMS). As the first handbook on Turkish memory studies, this collection brings together cutting-edge scholarship to offer readers an introduction to key concepts, debates, themes, and emergent trends in memory studies by exploring transnational, translocal and transcultural memory terrains, diverse social and cultural histories, polarizations and liminalities, multidirectional memory regimes and heterogeneous actors in Turkey and beyond.

By conducting memory research in borderlands we seek contributions that provide synthesis, and offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in the field (as opposed to single case studies and microhistories). The handbook thus foregrounds investigations of Turkish memory as a ‘borderland case’ reconstructed and reembodied in spatio-temporal borderlands involving the
transcultural mnemonic clusters and constellations regions from Ottoman past to contemporary Turkey (see fig. 1 and 2); geo-political borderlands including both land and maritime boundaries spanning from the Balkans to the Caucasus to the Middle East to Eastern Europe as well as from the Aegean Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea, involving countries such as Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania (see fig. 2); socio-cultural borderlands referring diverse ethnicities, minorities, migrations, diasporas, identities, languages, religions, beliefs and ideologies; psycho-emotional borderlands encompassing representations of instability, impulsivity, ambiguity, hypersensitivity, black-and-white thinking about neighboring countries, societies and cultures in Turkish memory culture.

The handbook adopts multidisciplinary and multimethodological perspectives drawing from various research fields and methods in history, sociology, psychology, literature, anthropology, political science, and more. The handbook is organized into the following sections:

• Transcultural memories: Ottoman past and post-imperial memories etc.
• Painful memories: Difficult pasts, conflicts, traumas, and resolutions etc.
• Memory politics: Identities, ideologies, diplomacies, diasporas etc.
• Migrating memories: Circulations, transmissions and reproductions etc.
• In/tangible heritage of memory: Monuments, sites, museums, folklore etc.
• Mediat(iz)ed memories: Mediums, aesthetic agencies, and techs etc.
• Ecological memories: Geographies, (disputed) territories, cultural landscape etc.
• Cognitive psychological memories: Individual memory, autobiographical memory,(collective) future thinking, flashbulb memories etc.

This handbook is edited by Erol Gülüm (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim (Boğaziçi University & Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey). Please send your abstract (250 to 400 words) with a short biographical statement to memorystudiesinturkey@gmail.com by April 15, 2024.

Notification of abstract acceptance is scheduled for the first week of May 2024. Selected contributors will be invited to submit a full manuscript of their chapter (6,000-8,000 words, including references and notes in English) by December 15, 2024. The review process is scheduled for the first half of 2025 with a planned publication early 2026.