New Honorary Doctor

Professor Astrid Erll with Queen Margrethe II of Denmark

With profound happiness, we congratulate Professor Astrid Erll, a MSA’s Advisory Board member, for receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Copenhagen. Check out an extract from a post from the University of Copenhagen on the new honorary doctors:

“Astrid Erll is one of the leading and fundamental forces within the ‘cultural memory studies’ research field. Memory studies is the study of our cultural and collective memory; how is the past told and remembered, and how do we produce and pass it on? The field has, to a great extent because of Erll’s work, in recent years grown and received a lot of attention, and Erll’s analytical methods and publications are used all over the world.

Anna Lena Sandberg, associate professor of German studies at UCPH and one of Erll’s two nominators, is very happy about being able to award the honorary doctorate to Astrid Erll:

– Astrid Erll has developed the research field of cultural memory and made it a dynamic way of examining the past as it manifests itself in monuments, media such as film and photography, fiction, family stories and museum exhibition practices. We are not only surrounded by history or products of it, but active co-creators of memory. And collective memory can also be a political tool, as is currently seen in the Ukraine war.

– In addition, Erll has designed a number of important analytical concepts, written textbooks – which are used in German studies and in many other language and culture studies here at the Humanities at UCPH – and she has expanded the field transnationally. She is a leading figure in the European and international research community and has participated in several of the faculty’s research projects. All in all, she is a great academic inspiration for both researchers and students, says Anna Lena Sandberg and adds that Erll, as an honorary doctor, will have an even stronger connection to the University of Copenhagen, and that she and her colleagues are looking forward to the continued collaboration.”