We would like to take an interdisciplinary look at the complex processes of forgetting, neglecting, negation, and detachment, along with creating, recollecting, remembering, regaining memories, and reconstructing one’s relationship with the past.

Our repertoire of suggested topics includes but is not restricted to: 

 

1. Lost Memory:

-  forgotten history

-  forgotten nations

-  forgotten heroes

-  forgotten legacy

-  forgotten times

-  forgotten revolutions

-  forgotten identity

-  forgotten authors

-  forgotten texts

-  forgotten languages

 

2. Memory Loss:

-  amnesia

-  Alzheimer’s disease

-  dementia

-  sclerosis

-  selective memory

-  repression

-  psychopathology of everyday life

 

3. Stolen Memory:

-  denationalisation

-  eradication

-  expulsion

-  disinheritance

-  exclusion

-  manipulation

-  propaganda

-  indoctrination

-  Holocaust (and other genocide) denial

-  “historical politics”

-  “cultural revolution”

 

4. Abandoned Memory:

-  non-action

-  negligence

-  indifference

-  insouciance

-  decline of attachment

-  emotional atrophy

-  disownment

-  betrayal

 

5. Memory as a Trap:

-  the terror of memory

-  trauma

-  post-memory

-  memory and mourning

-  nostalgia

-  fixation

-  the return of the repressed

-  “primal scenes”

-  compulsions

-  stereotypes

 

6. Memory Regained:

-  recollection

-  anamnesis

-  insight

-  epiphany

-   “time regained”

 

7. Dubious Memory:

-  déjà vu

-  confabulation

-  fabrication

-  rumour

-  apocryph

-  parallel histories

 

8. Memory and Imagination:

-  facts and phantasms

-  political phantasms

-  historiography and fantasising

-  the realness of memories

-  national mythologies

-  reconstructions and narrations

-  memory and representation

-  memory and fiction

-  non-fiction

-  autobiography

-  para-documentary film

-  imagination in mnemonics

-  collective memory and collective imagination

 

9. Memory and Art:

-  literature, art, film, theatre as memory “media”

-  socially engaged art: artists in defence of memory

-  Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness

-  Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time

-  Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain

-  Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude

-  Tadeusz Kantor and the “cliches of memory”

 

10. Memory and Science

-  mirror Neurons

-  diseases and syndromes of memory

-  “creating memory” in the lab

-  memory of matter (inorganic memory)

-  memory processing in technology

 

Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of your proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note, by 20 March 2018 to:

conferencememory@gmail.com 

The conference language is English.