Memory Studies, New Special Issue

We are pleased to share that the Special Issue of Sage’s Memory Studies Journal: “Taking Stock of Memory Studies”, with the MSA’s Founding Presidents as Guest Editors: Jeffrey Olick, Aline Sierp, and Jenny Wüstenberg, is out!

The special issue is composed of 14 articles that nonetheless each stand on their own. The editors have grouped “them into those that seek to open new geographical and cultural horizons in memory studies, those that seek to open, expand, combine, or, occasionally, critique, existent disciplinary perspectives, and those that seek to develop a new sensitivity to ecological transformations and have engendered new perspectives on temporality” (Olick, Sierp, Wüstenberg, 2023). The keyword of the issue is “openness, though an openness of a particular kind: not one that seeks to unify by washing out irreconcilable differences of experience and perspective, but one that embraces these differences head on” (Ibid).

Interested? Check out the complete special issue here.

Jeffrey K Olick is William R Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia and co-founder and past Co-President of the Memory Studies Association. With Stefan Berger, he edited A Cultural History of Memory (six volumes). His new book “In the Grip of the Past” will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. With Astrid Erll, he edits the series “Studies in Collective Memory” at Oxford University.

Aline Sierp is Associate Professor in European History & Memory Studies at Maastricht University (NL). Aline is the co-founder and past Co-President of the Memory Studies Association and the Council of European Studies’ Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe. 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). For more details, see https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/aline.sierp

Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is the co-founder and past Co-President of the Memory Studies Association, as well as Chair of the COST Action on “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices in Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change” (2021–2025). 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). 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.