Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

About the Series

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from 'what we know' to 'how we remember it'; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past.

These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking new series, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, tackles questions such as: What is 'memory' under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

About the Series Editors

Andrew Hoskins is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests focus on the theoretical and empirical investigation of today's 'new media ecology' and the nature of/challenges for individual, social and cultural memory in this environment. His books include: War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (2010), Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (2007) (both co-authored with Ben O´Loughlin), and Save As... Digital Memories (co-edited with Jo Garde-Hansen and Anna Reading, 2009). He is founding Principal Editor of the journal of Memory Studies.
Email: andrew.hoskins@nottingham.ac.uk

John Sutton is Research Professor in the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS), Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, where he was previously Head of the Department of Philosophy. His research interests lie generally in philosophy of psychology and in the history of science, and his main research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of memory. His publications include Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (1998) and Descartes' Natural Philosophy (co-edited, 2000). His current funded research projects address social memory and autobiographical memory; the historical study of memory practices; and the roles of memory in skilled movement. He is one of the editors of the journal Memory Studies.
Email: jsutton@maccs.mq.edu.au

Out Now:

Commemoration and Bloody Sunday
Pathways of Memory
Brian Conway

Immediately after Bloody Sunday (1972) newspaper coverage employed the metaphor of the Holocaust to interpret the shooting dead of thirteen civilians while peacefully marching against internment in Derry, Northern Ireland. This early global idiom virtually disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s and made a surprising comeback in the 1990s. In Commemoration and Bloody Sunday, Brian Conway uses the case of Bloody Sunday as a window onto the way sociologists theorize about the 'making' of memory and changing interpretations of the past. Focusing on the role of agency, contexts and temporality, and drawing on original empirical data from interviews, archival research and participant observation, he examines early interpretative struggles between Irish republicans and civil rights activists over the meaning of the event and how this was de-politicized in the 1990s in the quest for power to define the truth of what happened.

March 2010 | Hardback | £50.00 | 978-0-230-22888-7
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Forthcoming:

Northeast Asia's Difficult Past
Essays in Collective Memory
Edited by Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz

Asia's 'Memory Problem' is unique. Chinese, Japanese and Koreans assign great significance to their national pasts; disagreements about one another's history and commemorative practices are heated and affect diplomatic and economic relationships. Honour and shame societies teach their members to think about the past differently than do societies of dignity and guilt. In Northeast Asia, the events judged most negative reveal weakness or incompetence, and they induce shame. For this reason, the Western 'politics of regret', which include practices based on violations of dignity and a sense of collective guilt, cannot be directly generalized to Northeast Asian cultures. These cultures are, thus, privileged sites for the study of memory. In no other regional setting is the interdependence of history, commemoration and belief so significant and problematic. In no other setting is the Memory Problem so acute.

May 2010 | Hardback | £55.00 | 978-0-230-23747-6
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Memory in a Global Age
Discourses, Practices and Trajectories
Edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad

In the past decade, the field of memory has been dramatically reconfigured. Global conditions have powerfully impacted on memory debates, and at the same time, claims to memory are negotiated globally. This is a fundamental shift, as until recently, the dynamics of memory production unfolded primarily within the bounds of the nation-state; coming to terms with the past was largely a national project. Under the impact of processes of globalization, this has changed fundamentally. Today it has become impossible to understand the trajectories of memory outside a global frame of reference. This book offers an innovative inroad into the various problematics of memory in a global age. It presents analytical categories to chart the terrain, and it supplies richly documented case studies that illustrate the complexities of contemporary ways of appropriating the past. Written from different cultural positions and from different disciplinary backgrounds, the collection of essays emphasizes the positionality of memory production as it is negotiated locally and globally.

August 2010 | Hardback | £50.00 | 978-0-230-27291-0
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The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary
Literature and Culture
Richard Crownshaw

As living memories of the Holocaust die out with the generation that witnessed the event, practitioners of memory work have focused on the transmission of memory to the next generations. Recent Holocaust memorialisation, in the form of literature, museums, memorials and monuments, must make Holocaust memory meaningful for those born after the event. With this in mind, the arts of Holocaust memorialisation often provoke a sense of secondary memory or vicarious witnessing, an attempt to experience Holocaust memory or even trauma by proxy – in short, the remembrance of things not witnessed.

September 2010 | Hardback | £55.00 | 978-0-230-58187-6
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Memory and the Future
Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society
Edited by Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro

For those who study memory there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, that memory itself and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized can potentially hinder efforts to move forward. However, there are many memory scholars and practitioners who firmly believe that the study of memory is ultimately about and for the present and future. This view of memory as looking to the past as a way to shape the present and future is the basis for the increasingly relevant and pressing concerns about the relationship of memory to conflict and democratic politics: human rights and transitional justice, post-colonial memory, revenge and violence, testimony, imposture and forgery, social movements and utopian ideas, and the role of historical knowledge and testimony. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to examine the relationship between past and present, and especially past and future.

October 2010 | Hardback | £50.00 | 978-0-230-24740-6
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