Projects
Facing up to the Dictatorial Past: Cultural Memory and the Responsibility for Fascism in post-1990 Italian literature Ghent University
Memory scholars have been criticising the state of collective memory in the West arguing that efforts made to commemorate the crimes of the 20th century have neither reduced racism nor spread tolerance across society. Building on the latest memory studies and historical scholarship, this project contends that the main shortcoming of contemporary memory has been a still too limited conceptualisation of a sense of responsibility for the past. ...
Intersections of Cultural Memory and Human Rights: The Case of Dave Eggers Ghent University
This project examines the interrelations between cultural memory and human rights via a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the work of the contemporary American author Dave Eggers, which encompasses bestselling novels, collaboratively produced testimonies, publishing ventures, and social activism.
Contested past: the representation of the past and the construction of cultural memory in the Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian literature of the 1990s Ghent University
The aim of this project is to analyse the scope and role of the post-Yugoslav prose of the 1990s in the transformation of the 'cultural memory' in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.
Remember Africa? The effects of twice-migration on the religious and cultural lives of British ‘East African’ Jains Ghent University
The project "Remember Africa?” uses different types of contemporary memorial projects and narratives of individual Jains in the UK to address the experience of twice-migration and its impact upon religious and cultural praxis. It comprises two distinct levels of inquiry.
First, it will approach memory as a source, and construct a continuous history of Jainism as it moved spatially from India to East-Africa to the UK, and temporally ...
Finding the present in the distant past: The cultural meaning of antiquarianism in Late Antiquity (4-7th c. AD) Ghent University
Ancient antiquarianism has been identified as a major source of inspiration for the
development of modern historiographical practice from the Renaissance onwards.
Yet it remains seriously understudied, in particular for late Antiquity, the crucial
period of transition and transmission to the Middle Ages. The present project
proposes to fill that gap. It proposes (1) to expand the range of sources by editing ...
Remembering the Possible. Literature, Affect and Activist Memory in Germany, 1848-1900. KU Leuven
This project will map and analyse literary forms of activist memory in Germany, written in the period from 1848, when socialist activists started to regroup after the failed revolution, up to 1900. This project aims to achieve two main goals. First, it will argue that literature is a particularly well-suited discourse to explore the activist political mind. Specifically, this project will profoundly change our image of the German labour ...
Remembering the City of Life. The literary memory of the occupation of Fiume (1919-2015) KU Leuven
In September 1919 a group of volunteers headed by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the town of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) to claim its annexation to Italy. During the occupation, that lasted till December 1920, Fiume became a unique political and artistic labyrinth, attracting all sorts of political activists, as well as many Italian and foreign avant-garde artists. Extensive scholarly attention has been devoted to the ...
Reflecting and resisting. Polish theatre and politics of memory since 2005 KU Leuven
This research argues that contemporary Polish theatre has been marked by this struggle between those creating performances and state authorities that see those creations as a threat to their authority. It interrogates the ways in which the artistic and political strategies that have been developed in the past two decades in the Polish theatre field can be theorized as queer artistic and political strategies. It will argue that this struggle ...
The role of social memory processes in community formation during the Roman Imperial Period (25 BC - c. 300 AD) in Pisidia (SW-Anatolia) KU Leuven
The main questions this project answers revolve around what it meant for Pisidian social groups (SW Asia Minor) to be part of the Roman Empire in terms of actual impact, and how they used social memory processes to (re)negotiate their existence within this dynamic world. In chapter 1, we demonstrate the negative impact of modern social memory processes on our understanding of Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Pisidia by deconstructing the ...