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Research cluster
Memory and Trauma Through History and Culture
This research cluster was initiated in 2019 by a group of researchers in the Department of Global Humanities—Eirini Kotsovili, James Horncastle, and Alessandra Capperdoni—working in the fields of culture, history, and theory to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers from different institutions but also experts and interested subjects not affiliated with universities. The literature on cultural memory, history and memory, and trauma is abundant, registering an intensification of scholarship and a widening scope across historical events, nations, states, and social concerns at the turn of the century. The contemporary world faces new challenges and it is less clear what direction new modes of enquiry and approaches of critical thought will be taking.
Past events organized and sponsored by the cluster include the organization of a Migrations Symposium and a Pandemic/s Symposium in 2020, and Greece and the Environment in 2023. Members of the research cluster have also presented and co-organized workshops, such as Xenos; the Stranger, the Foreigner, the Refugee with NKUA (2023).
Research Questions
- How do acts of individual remembrance, collective memory, and narrative history intersect the irruption of trauma into human life?
- In an age that reifies trauma as a trope for consumption in discourse, is the violence of the event at a risk of erasure?
- What are the complexities and the limitations of cultural memory practices?
- Who is allowed to remember and under what conditions?
- How do silencing and forgetting operate in social discourse and culture?
- How to account for the individual and the subjective against the force of the public and the social?
- How to retrieve the verbalization of traumatic experiences when words fail to re-present them?
- What are the possibilities of cultural work in the face of traumatic events and their aftermath?
- What temporalization do memory and trauma call for in real life experience as well as in the social discourse that they engender? How is such temporalization related to the acceleration of global capital?
- What role do the Anthropocene and climate change play in the experience of temporality?
- What role do memory and trauma studies can play for the engendering of a new futurity?
- Can we think of memory and trauma in relation to positive emotions, such as hope?
Past Events
Athens, Greece (May 28, 2023)
Online via Zoom (November 20, 2020)
Online via Zoom (October 9–10, 2020)
Principal investigators
The research cluster includes James Horncastle, assistant professor and Edward and Emily McWhinney Professor in International Relations, Eirini Kotsovili, senior lecturer, and Alessandra Capperdoni, lecturer and undergraduate chair, from the Department of Global Humanities.
Contact
We welcome contact with any individual or organization working across disciplinary fields, histories, and futurities whose work can be enriched by collaboration on any of the questions listed below but we are also interested in exploring new suggestions as well as possibilities for future collaboration with community workers.
We invite them to write to any of the principal investigators: