Between mind, media, and society: Visions for the interdisciplinary future of memory studies

A Roundtable organized by Astrid Erll & Bill Hirst

What is out there in terms of 'new interdiciplinary thought and practice' in memory studies? This roundtable showcases visionary projects that bring together cognitive psychology with social, cultural & media studies approaches to memory. Five short inputs (ca. 5-7 mins.) will throw light on ongoing research and publishing projects. Together with our discussant we will try to identify the possibilities and challenges for research that seeks to connect memory in mind, media, and society.

Presenters:

Aline Cordonnier is a cognitive psychologist working as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLouvain in Belgium. Her studies currently focus on the intergenerational transmission of personal and living historical memories within families. Throughout her PhD and her postdoctoral research projects, Aline has worked in interdisciplinary teams with colleagues from social psychology, philosophy, history and political science.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Professor in the College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow UK. In collaboration with Amanda Barnier over many years, he has worked to explore the interdisciplinary connections between the social sciences, digital media studies and cognitive psychology. From 2023 he is editing a new interdisciplinary collection on 'Forgetting' in Memory, Mind & Media.

Lovro Škopljanac is Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, Zagreb University. His work mostly proceeds along the four axes of CLS, which stands not only for Comparative Literary Studies, but also for Contemporary Literary Subjects (readers), Cognitive Literary Studies and Computational Literary Studies.

Piotr Szpunar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY. In his collaboration with Karl Szpunar he brings the insights of media studies and political communication to bear on psychological studies of memory and future thinking.

Jeremy Yamashiro is an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His recent work on collective temporal thought has examined how people's mental representations of the collective past interact with their imagination for the collective future. Although adopting primarily cognitive psychological methods to examine mental representations, this program is deeply informed by an interdisciplinary memory studies perspective.

Discussant:

Ann Rigney (Chair of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, leader of the ERC project Remembering Activism: the Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe)

Chairs:

Astrid Erll is professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). She is interested in general memory theory and that implies an understanding of social, medial, and psychological dynamics. She understands memory studies as an ongoing conversation between researchers from various fields.

William Hirst is Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research. He examines the contribution of the cognitive sciences to the study of social and collective memory. He is particularly interested in the social aspects of forgetting and its role in the formation of both autobiographical and collective memories, the way people remember history, and the nexus between autobiographical and collective memories.