Guest Lectures (4) of renowned US specialists on the topic (public lectures at UB): schedule will be posted under ‘News’
Readings
Workshop Focus and Structure
We are thankful for a second year of funding (Academic year 2009/10)
of the Humanities Institute
Structure and Principle Focus of the Research Workshop 2009/10
Structure:
- Research workshop with monthly meetings (3 hours: Wednesdays 3-6 pm) in all the departments involved. Individual or joint presentations with subsequent discussion.
- Organization of a 1-day conference on “Time and Memory” at UB in spring 2010.
- 4 Guest speakers (2 per semester): renowned US specialists on the topic (public lectures at UB and discussion)
- Preparation of an edited book (UB conference papers, guest lectures as articles or discussants/commentary chapters).
Principal Focus of the Research Workshop:
- Materiality, spatiality and temporality
- Materialization of memory
- Concepts of Time
- Temporality and spacing
- Transformation of memory
- Migrant memory
- Historical consciousness and historical imagination
- Personal and social memory
- Historical consciousness, historicism in narrative
- Vernacular representations of memory/history in personal stories, narratives, oral histories
Description and Aims of the Research Workshop 2009/10:
During the first year of this workshop, we have been able to identify areas of common interest of its members regarding their work on time, temporality and memory. Throughout the year, it has become clear that these commonalities are all based on the need to scrutinize and synthesize ‘time’ to speak about the latter: whether our research is in history, pre-history, material culture, classics or socio-cultural anthropology – we must conceive of time in a comparative fashion or it cannot be conceived at all.
In the second and final year of our workshop, we want to use this fundamental insight to establish relationships between various different ways to conceptualize time. The synthetics of time must be produced by linking a variety of different ways of thinking temporality (memory, historicity, historical context, temporal materiality, temporal affect, forgetting, narration, inscription, origin, fate, etc.) with each other. For instance, to think about memory becomes problematic if we do not understand that any claim for remembrance also always includes the possibility of forgetting; a temporal statement about any particular topic is only possible against the backdrop of this synthetic insight. We will therefore bring together our varying interests in time and temporality under the theme of ‘synthetics of time’ to further develop our present, productive interactions in the second year. Our concrete plans for the second year involve presenting our work at an interdisciplinary conference at UB in spring 2010 and intensifying work on an edited volume bringing together the research of all the workshop members and the invited speakers.
|