Lead Organizer
Dr Catherine Gilbert Catherine Gilbert is a Newcastle University Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow in the School of Modern Languages. She is author of From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women's Writing (2018), which received the Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award in 2019. Her current research focuses on genocide commemoration and education in the Rwandan diaspora, and from 2021-2023 she was Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Ishami Foundation, a genocide education charity working in the UK and Rwanda. She is an Executive Committee member of the Memory Studies Association and leading the organisation of the MSA 2023 Newcastle Conference.
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Local Team
| Alison Atkinson-Phillips Alison Atkinson-Phillips is lecturer in Public History, a member of the Oral History Unit & Collective and co-convenor of the Cultures of Memory research group at Newcastle University. Alison is author of Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia (2019), which documents the work of memory activists in bringing acknowledgement of difficult experiences into the public sphere and physically into public spaces. Her research aims to understand the formative experiences that lead individuals to take on an activist role in a range of contexts, and the ways individual actions intersect with local and national policy. |  |
Dr Jorge Catalá Carrasco Jorge Catalá is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Newcastle University. His research areas include cultural studies, popular culture and cultural history in periods of crisis, with a focus on comics in Spain and Latin America. He is author of Vanguardia y humorismo gráfico en crisis (2015) and he co-edited Comics and Memory in Latin America (2017), also available in Spanish. He is currently a co-investigator on the international research project (COST-EU funded) entitled iCOn-MICS – Investigation on comics and graphic novels in the Iberian cultural area.
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| Dr Susannah Eckersley Susannah Eckersley is a Senior Lecturer in Media Culture Heritage, specialising in Museum, Gallery and Heritage Studies, and an associated researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany. She is lead co-editor of the Routledge Book Series Critical Heritages of Europe and part of the Leibniz Research Alliance 'Values of the Past'. She is the UK Principal Investigator for the AHRC-DFG project 'Cultural Dynamics: Museums and Democracy in Motion' (2023-2026) and was the Project Leader and Principal Investigator of 'en/counter/points: (re)negotiating belonging through culture and contact in public space and place' (2019-2023), funded by HERA. |  |
| Róża Kochanowska Róża is a PhD student at the University of Warsaw. Her scientific activity focuses on the history of language, urban toponymy and language corpora. In her work, she researches the vocabulary created during World War II. In 2020/2021, she participated in the organization of the Memory Studies Association 'Convergences' Conference in Warsaw (July 5-9, 2021) and co-organized the MSA Forward Postgraduate Workshop (July 1-2, 2021). She is currently employed by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences on the project '24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies from the War'. |  |
Dr Philippa Page Philippa Page is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies and Co-Director of the Humanities Research Institute at Newcastle University. Her current research looks at the feminist imaginaries of post-dictatorship Argentina from the perspective of reproductive justice as part of the AHRC project 'Screening Violence: A Transnational Approach to Post-Conflict Imaginaries'. She is author of Politics and Performance in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Film and Theatre (2011) and co-producer of the documentary Cantos insumisos (dir. Alejo Moguillansky, 2023). In her role at the Humanities Research Institute, she supports interdisciplinary collaborations that engage the humanities in addressing society's most pressing challenges and injustices.
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| Dr James Riding James Riding is a Newcastle University Academic Track Fellow (NUAcT) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. His research focuses on the geographies of landscape, the geographies of memory, and the geographies of conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is the author of The Geopolitics of Memory: A Journey to Bosnia, published by Ibidem Press in 2019 as part of the Balkan Politics and Society book series. |
| Dr Laura Routley Laura Routley is Senior Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Politics. Her current Leverhulme-funded research project – Afterlives of colonial incarceration: African Prisons, Politics and Architecture – explores the memory politics of former sites of imprisonment in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. It investigates struggles over how these sites have been repurposed (or not), through the preservation or alteration of buildings and spaces. These explorations serve to illuminate postcolonial tensions around identity, Africa's place in the international, and imagined futures. |  |
Samantha Vaughn Samantha is a doctoral researcher at Newcastle University. Her current work examines constructions of knowledge about and representations of Communism in museums, with a specific focus on Polish and Czech museums. Her wider research interests include post-conflict memory and heritage as well as the roles of these in furthering human rights and social justice. These were particularly fostered during an internship at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, which she completed in summer 2022 thanks to Newcastle University's partnership with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. |  |
Program Committee
Catherine Gilbert, Newcastle University
Sakiru Adebayo, University of British Columbia
Jelena Dureinović, University of Vienna
Susannah Eckersley, Newcastle University
Linda Norris, International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC)
Jill Strauss, CUNY
María Eugenia Ulfe, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Joanna Wawrzyniak, University of Warsaw
Jenny Wüstenberg, Nottingham Trent University
For more information on MSA please visit https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/