Newsletter – December 2021

The election results are in. The following people (in alphabetical order) have been elected to the Ethics and Finance Committees:

Ethics Committee:

• Mary M. McCarthy
• Jill Strauss
• Tamara Trošt
• Hannah Wilson
• Tebessüm Yilmaz
• Jessica Young

Finance Committee:

• Ela Rossmiller
• Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková

You can read more about the elected candidates and their visions here. The MSA would like to extend its congratulations to all successful candidates and its thanks to all candidates who participated in the elections. Without people putting themselves forward, these elections and the running of the MSA would not be possible! Best of luck to the newly formed Committees.

The Call for Proposals for the Seoul 2022 conference is out, and the submission system is now open! The theme of this year’s conference is Solidarity. The challenges of the  COVID-19 pandemic — amid rising inequality and the climate crisis — have forcefully demonstrated the necessity and precarity of solidarity,  as well as its contested nature. This has, in turn, brought to light the  need to reflect upon the pivotal role of collective memory in  constructing, reinforcing, or interrogating various forms of solidarity.  We hope that the conference will provide an opportunity to bring  together a range of different approaches and analyses for illuminating  the multi-faceted and multi-layered dimensions of mnemonic solidarity.

We particularly encourage proposals that critically examine the  limitations of the prevailing epistemologies of antagonistic and/or  cosmopolitan memory, de-center global North perspectives, and explore  new ways of imagining transnational mnemonic solidarity based on  justice, mutual understanding, and recognition of differences. Of  course, we also very much welcome proposals on all other areas of memory studies — especially those areas that have been relatively  under-explored.

Read about the conference and the full CfP, and submit your proposal here. Deadline: January 15, 2022.

The MSA wants to hear from you, and talk to you! For this reason, its Co-Presidents, President-Elect and Executive Committee are happy to announce an open Members Meeting, where all MSA members are warmly invited to bring up issues and provide suggestions, comments or requests. The meeting will take place on January 27, 2022, at 16.00 CET/UTC+1.

You can already register for the Members Meeting here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the meeting. See you there!

The MSA would like to extend a big thank you once again to Hanna Teichler for her work as interim president. As of the 1st January, Aline Sierp will be returning to the role. Fortunately for us, Hanna will not be going far as she remains a member of the EC!

The dMSA has had a very successful year with sessions on topics ranging from the most recent Crises, Memory, and Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa to Careers in Memory Studies. You can find this year’s sessions in our dMSA YouTube playlist here or in our dMSA archive.

Do you have a topic or a potential roundtable in mind? Reach out and tell us all about it! The MSA welcomes all kinds of events and conversations about memory. You can submit your proposal here, or ask the team any questions at dmsa@memorystudiesassociation.org.

See you in dMSA 2022!

Our working, regional and national groups have been very active the past months! This is what they have to tell us about:

New! WG Memories of Antiquity

The MSA is thrilled to welcome its newest Working Group: Memories of Antiquity. The group, chaired by Madeleine Scherer, Jakob Schneider and Aaron Schmitt, starts its adventures with this call for engagement:

“In this research collective, we plan to encourage, enable, and co-ordinate international collaborations between scholars of various disciplines interested in memory studies and the study of antiquity. We are scholars of antiquity (ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Near East) and its reception, and are looking for fellow researchers who are, like us, interested in using approaches from memory studies (such as memory schemata, travelling memory, oral memory, memoryscapes, etc.) to discuss the reception and transmission of and within antiquity. If you are interested in joining our research group, please drop us a line via memories.of.antiquity@gmail.com and we will add you to our mailing list.”

You can read the full letter on their page – go read it and get in touch!

MSA Nordic

The deadline for the MSA Nordic 2022 conference, on the topic of “Explorations of Counter-Memory”, has been extended to January 10, 2022. The 2022 MSA Nordic conference will focus on exploring the notion of counter-memory from various perspectives. We wish to invite contributions focusing on theoretical, methodological, and ethical explorations of the concept as well as case studies focusing on specific counter-memories or acts of countering. More information on the call is available here.

MSA Africa Chapter

The MSA Africa Chapter has recently had a successful and enlightening Annual Conference around the topic of “Memory in Africa: State of the Field”. You can read the report and highlights of this fruitful two-day conference here.

MSA Canada

The MSA Canada group is happy to announce a new working email address where you can find them directly and promptly: msa.ca.network@gmail.com. Reach out to them and get involved!

If you are part of a WG, RG or NN and would like to feature your news and opportunities in the MSA page or newsletter, don’t hesitate to reach out through info@memorystudiesassociation.org.

The MSA is happy to promote several instances of good scholarly work amongst its members! Read up and make sure to note down these titles and resources:

Dr. Ruramisai Charumbira has published a chapter titled “The Historian as Memory Practitioner” in the open-acess book The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa, edited by Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Moritz Mihatsch and Michelle Sikes. In her chapter, Dr. Charumbira invites a conversation about African languages in the research and narration of African histories and cultures for African ontological and epistemological freedom, and global reconsideration.

Dr. Matt James, Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, has recently published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science the article “The Structural Injustice Turn, the Historical Justice Dilemma, and Assigning Responsibility with the TRC Report“. This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, Dr. James argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility.

Prof. Rafal Pankowski (Collegium Civitas and NEVER AGAIN Association) and Natalia Sineaeva, both members of the Memory Studies Association, in collaboration with regional members and colleagues from the Balac Program at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok), American University of Phnom Penh, and with support of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) an Heinrich Boell Stiftung Cambodia, organised the first of its kind Symposium “Identifying and Countering Holocaust Distortion: Lessons for and from Southeast Asia” on the 23rd-26th November.  Video recordings can be found here, and a report of the symposium here.

Have you recently published an article or won an award? Do you know of colleagues that you believe to be long overdue for their shining moment? Get in touch via info@memorystudiesassociation.org!

Last but not least, we continue to compile vacancies and calls for papers and articles for the benefit of our members! You can find the job listings here, and the CfPs on the newsfeed of our website. We list a few here with an informative blurb for easier access.

• University College Dublin, Ireland (UCD), School of Sociology is hiring an Assistant Professor (Above Bar – Prestigious Ad-Astra Fellow). Memory studies, nationalism, war and human rights are among many topics and areas of interest. Deadline: Valentine’s Day 2022! You can find more details here.
• A conference on the relationship between remembering and activism is being held in May next year. Titled “Remembering Contentious Lives”, it is organised as part of the ERC research project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (PI Prof. Ann Rigney). If you are interested in participating, read the call for abstracts here.
• The Centre for Jewish History has a number of research fellowships available. More information is available here.
• A summer course given by the Central European University on Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies: Trauma Through Contemporary and Historical Perspectives is currently taking sign-ups. Read about it here.
• A PhD course on “Researching Memories and Narratives – Intersectional and transnational perspectives” is taking registrations. Read more and sign up here.

Do you know of any interesting positions or CfPs opening up soon? Get in touch with us (via info@memorystudiesassociation.org) and help us create a reliable database and place of encounter for memory scholars and practitioners!