Election of Executive Board Members 2021

The online election polls were open from Sunday February 28th, to Sunday March 28th. There were three slates for the EC positions, and active MSA members could vote for up to two candidates in each slate. In the fourth and final slate, there was a choice for President-Elect. You can read about the elected candidates below.

President-Elect

Sarah Gensburger

I am a research professor in social sciences at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). I work at the intersection of memory studies, public policy analysis and micro-history. My dissertation in sociology aimed at putting Halbwachs theory to the empirical test. My habilitation introduced mainstream political science into memory studies.

I also have been exploring new ways to practice memory studies, also reaching beyond academia: by using blogs, podcasts and collaborative projects. My 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). I published nine books, five special issues, 25 articles and 30 chapters.

1-Year EC Term

Hanna Teichler

Hanna Teichler holds a PhD from the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt, and a M.A. degree in English, French and Portuguese philology. She works as a research associate at the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her first monograph engages with reconciliation processes in Australia and Canada and their resonance in contemporary transcultural literature and film, and is in preparation for publication (Berghahn, Worlds of Memories). Her postdoc project is interested in oceanic memories. Hanna is member of the MSA Executive Committee and the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. She is the co-editor of Brill’s new book series in Memory Studies (with Rebekah Vince) titled Mobilizing Memories.

Joanna Wawrzyniak

Joanna Wawrzyniak is a senior researcher and Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw. She is interested in developing memory studies at the intersection of sociology and history, as well as in exploring Eastern European memory processes in a global comparative framework. Her current projects include work on memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation, and deindustrialization in Poland and contributions to collaborative research on cultural heritage, museums, and memory processes in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and East and South Asia. She has published, among others, in Memory Studies, Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies and Polish Sociological Review. Her books in English include co-edited Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (Berghahn Books 2016); co-authored The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (Berghahn Books 2015); and Veterans, Victims and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (Peter Lang 2015). Her more recent co-authored book in Polish is Cięcia. Mówiona historia transformacji (Cuts. Oral History of Post-Socialism, Wyd. Krytyka Polityczna, 2020). Her work was supported by grants of the European Commission, national agencies, and fellowships at several European universities.

2-Year EC Term

Jelena Đureinović

Jelena Đureinović is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Giessen where she was a member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture. She has published on Europeanisation and memory politics, memory laws and discourses of victimhood under communism. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution was published with Routledge in 2020. Her current research project explores the interplay of right-wing populism and memory politics and the specificities of memory politics in contemporary authoritarian democracies. She is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). She developed the Memory Activism Programme at the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade, where she is still involved in providing strategic direction to the programme.

Sang-Hyun Kim

Sang-Hyun Kim is currently associate professor at the Critical Global Studies Institute at 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 and cultural history of development and modernization. His publications include: Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (co-edited with Sheila Jasanoff, University of Chicago Press, 2015); “Science and Technology: National Identity, Self-reliance, Technocracy and Biopolitics” (in The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship, 2016); “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).

3-Year EC Term

Catherine Gilbert

Dr Catherine Gilbert is an Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, UK, having recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at Ghent University, Belgium (2018-2020). Her research is located at the intersection of postcolonial and memory studies, with a particular focus on cultural memory, trauma and narrative. Her current research project, ‘Genocide Commemoration in the Rwandan Diaspora’, investigates the impact of place and displacement on commemorative practices within diasporic communities. Her first monograph, From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2018) was awarded the Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award in 2019. This work examined the published testimonies written by Rwandan women genocide survivors and challenged established Western uses of trauma theory to deal with memory of atrocity. Gilbert recently co-edited, with Kate McLoughlin and Niall Munro, the volume On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Remembering War (Peter Lang, 2020).

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska

Born in 1980, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska studied film studies and sociology at the Universities in Lodz, Giessen and Mainz. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 and completed her habilitation, in 2016. Her research focus is on cultural memories and visual histories in Poland and Germany. From 2010 to 2015, she coordinated the project “Modi Memorandi. Lexicon of Memory Culture” (in Polish). 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. 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. She is also the Ambassador Scientist of the Humboldt Foundation in Poland.