Ethics Committee (Elected in December 2021)

The Ethics Committee acts on the basis of the MSA Code of Conduct. It is in charge of arbitration in case of conflicts between MSA members. More fundamentally, it contributes to the evolution of the MSA Code of Conduct, building a body of rules through precedents. It also makes statements and recommendations on ethical issues and provides some guidance for researchers and practitioners belonging to the Memory Studies community. The MSA Ethics Committee has one member representing the Executive Committee and six individuals drawn from the general membership (of which at least two are PhD students). Any MSA member is eligible to run.

Mary M. McCarthy is a professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of memory studies, diaspora studies, feminist studies, and international relations, with a regional focus on Asia and the Asia Pacific. Her most recent publications include “The Creation and Utilization of Opportunity Structures for Transnational Activism on WWII Sexual Slavery in Asia” in Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline Sierp, ed. Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Berghahn Books, 2020), “Political and Social Contestation in the Memorialization of Comfort Women in the United States” in Sabine Marschall, ed. Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement: Migrants and Monuments (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), and “The Enduring Challenges of History Issues” in Takeo Hoshi and Phillip Lipscy, eds. The Political Economy of the Abe Government and Abenomics Reforms (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She has been an active member of the Memory Studies Association since 2017.

Tamara Pavasović Trošt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (2012). Her research interests include nationalism and ethnicity, memory politics, and youth values. Previously, she was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, and spent the 2015-16 year as a Fung Fellow at Princeton University. Her most recent publications include Europeanization and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (co-editor, 2021), and various articles on history education and nationalism in Memory Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and War & Society.

Jill Strauss, PhD, teaches Conflict Resolution and Communications at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). Her research involves Restorative Practices and the visual interpretation of contested histories. She incorporates virtual reality technology in her curriculum so that students can make hidden histories visible by creating monuments in augmented reality. This project has grown into a collaboration with Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. Jill is a member of the MSA Museums and Memory Working Group and is co-editing a special issue journal with the MSA Witnessing Working Group. Jill completed her PhD at Ulster University in Northern Ireland in 2010, where she designed an innovative fieldwork project integrating storytelling and visual art for empathy and validation as one way to address a history of mutual humiliation and historical conflict. Jill is co-editor of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press 2019) along with other articles and book chapters.

Hannah Wilson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Public History, Heritage and Memory at Nottingham Trent University, where she currently works as a research assistant. She has received funding awards from Midlands4cities and the La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah for her ongoing research into the material memory of Sobibór. She is a Web, Blog & Social Media Coordinator for British Association for Holocaust Studies, and an MA graduate of the Weiss-Livnat International MA program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa. She has also participated in the archaeological research at Sobibór and Treblinka death camps. Hannah was also a placement content researcher at the IWM Holocaust Galleries for over a year during their development.

Tebessüm Yılmaz Wilke is a feminist activist-researcher based in Berlin. Until 2016 she was a Ph.D. candidate at Istanbul University’s Department of International Relations and Political Science where she was working towards her thesis on Turkish State Violence Against Kurds, Trauma, and Resistance in Kurdish Cinema. After signing a peace petition in early 2016 demanding an end to the violence in Northern Kurdistan (Bakur), she was forced to quit her studies. She is currently recommencing her doctoral studies at the department of Diversity and Social Conflict at Humboldt University in Berlin. She campaigns to secure persecuted academics, especially graduate students, a safe space to continue their studies at universities abroad. Her academic interests include feminism, feminist and queer theory, feminist and queer methodologies, memory studies, critical film studies, Kurdish studies, and transitional justice studies.

Jessica K. Young is an Assistant Professor of Global English at New College of Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she cofounded the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies graduate and faculty reading group and coedited, with Michael Rothberg, Days and Memory, the blog of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Her research has been published in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. She is an enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

Catherine Gilbert is the MSA Executive Committee representative in the Ethics Committee. She 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).

Financial Committee (Elected in December 2021)

Every two years, candidates can nominate themselves for a Financial Committee that the MSA membership will elect from among the members, consisting of two persons who may not be on the Executive Committee. The Financial Committee must audit the balance sheets and the statement of income and expenditure of the association and must report its findings to the MSA membership.

Ela Rossmiller is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Wilson College, where she teaches comparative politics and international relations. Her research concerns Polish legislative debates from 1989 to 2016 surrounding commemorative resolutions for martial law as well as rehabilitation and compensation laws for victims of political repression and anti-communist activists during the Communist period.  She is currently a research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková received her Ph.D. from Pierre Mendès-France University in Grenoble, France, and currently is an Associate Professor of History at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her research interests encompass oral history, memory studies, gender and historiographical trends. She has published numerous book chapters and articles, among others, in the Gendering Postsocialism: Old Legacies and New Hierarchies (eds. Y. Gradskova and I. A. Morell, Routledge, 2018), Journal of Family History and Gender Studies. She is the author and co-author of five monographs in Czech, most recently Family and Its Memory in Us as Mirrored in Three-Generational Narratives (Triton, 2018) and Family Also Has Its Own Memory: Family Memory in an Interdisciplinary Context (NLN, 2018).

She is a co-chair of the MSA group Family Memory and Intergenerational Exchange. She has edited a volume Family Memory: Practices, Transmission and Uses in a Global Perspective, to be published 31st December 2021 (Routledge).

Nominations and Regulations Committee (Elected in January 2024)

The Nominations & Regulations Committee (NRC) is formed by four members, and it is appointed by the Executive Committee according to a two-year cycle, with clear guidelines for generating nominations. The Nominations & Regulations Committee aids in the organisation of elections, particularly those for President and Executive Committee, and guarantees their transparency and smooth development.

Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia and past co-president of the Memory Studies Association. Trained in the sociological tradition of Èmile Durkheim, he is interested in the production, circulation, and reception of collective representations about the past, especially emphasizing difficult memories (with particular, though not exclusive, interest in Germany). With Vered Vintizky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, he edited The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford 2011), with Stefan Berger A Cultural History of Memory (Bloomsbury 2020, six volumes), with Andrew Perrin two translations and critical editions of Frankfurt School works on public opinion (Guilt and Defense [Harvard 2010] and Group Experiment and Other Writings [Harvard 2011]), with Simon Lewis, Joanna Wawrzyniak, and Malgorzata Pakier Regions of Memory (Palgrave 2022), and with Hanna Teichler (2021) and then Aline Sierp and Jenny Wustenberg (2023), two special issues of Memory Studies (Memory and Crisis and Taking Stock of Memory Studies). With Aline Sierp and Jenny Wustenberg, he edits the book series “Worlds of Memory” (with Berghahn) and with Astrid Erll “Studies in Collective Memory” (with Oxford). He routinely supervises ph.d. and postdoctoral work in memory studies and related fields (transitional justice, trauma and disaster studies, as well as cultural sociology more broadly) and welcomes inquiries.

Valerie Rosoux is a Research Director at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). She teaches International Negotiation, Transitional Justice, and Memory Politics at UCLouvain (Belgium). She has a Degree in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Political Sciences. Her research interests focus on post-war reconciliation and the uses of memory in international relations. In 2010-2011, she was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (Washington DC). Since 2016, she has been a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. In 2020, she was awarded a Max Planck Law Fellowship (a multi-year project that has enabled her to form and lead a research group on Memory and Transitional Justice). In 2020 she was appointed by the Belgian Parliament to serve on a commission to deal with the colonial past and was the only expert who participated in the writing of both the initial and the final reports of the Parliamentary commission (August 2020–December 2022). She is now writing a book, provisionally titled Negotiating Decolonization: The Limits of a Fairy Tale, based on this long period of participant observation.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In the years 2005-2017 she was the head of the Centre for European Studies in Lund and 2018-2024 dean of research at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Her main research interests are memory, identity and nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe. She has participated in many international research projects for example 2012-2016 she was the leader of the EU’s COST-action “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” , 2017-2020 a co-leader of Nordic research network on Historical Trauma and currently she is a co-leader of the Horizon Europe Widera project “Facing the Past. Public History for Stronger Europe” as well MC member in COST action “Slow Memory. Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerated Change”. She is the editor and author of a number of books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish. Among them: The Twentieth Century in European Memory, (Amsterdam 2017), and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (New York-London 2016). She is also co-editor for the CEU book series “Memory, Heritage and Public History in Central and Eastern Europe”.

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He is also Principal Investigator of the research project Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan Publisher. His recent memory studies books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). Victimhood Nationalism-A Global History (Humanist, 2021, Japanese translation-2022), Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021) co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft. As a memory activist, he has been co-curating exhibitions of “Unwelcome Neighbors,” “Naming Forced Laborers” and others. Most recently, he published “Die Causa Mbembe im mnemonischen Kontext des globalen Ostens: Gegen den Erinnerungsprovinzialismus der Mbembe-Debatte,“ in Matthias Böckmann, Matthias Gockel, Reinhart Kößler, Henning Melber eds., Jenseits von Mbembe: Erinnerung, Politik, Solidarität (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2022).