Postgraduate Memory Network Statement

The postgraduate branch of the Memory Network is an opportunity for postgraduate students to engage in a dialogue between different disciplines on the role of memory in both academic and public life. We want to bring together graduate students from a variety of academic backgrounds to share new insights into memory and how it is conceived, discuss their implications, and reflect on how this conversation can help to broaden their scope in future research. A driving vision for the network is to create a dialogue between the sciences and humanities, and to achieve a combined effort in formulating and answering questions surrounding human memory and the brain. Memory is fascinating for writers and scientists alike, and particularly relevant in the current political and cultural climate, in which the World War One centenary is raising issues related to forgetting as well as remembrance, while the neurosciences continue to make impressive progress on mapping the human brain. Given what our new findings can tell us about ourselves, how do we proceed with this knowledge? What is the role of academic research and the humanities in understanding the experience of memory? Remembering and forgetting are vital parts of our daily lives, both on an individual and on a collective level. The Memory Network hopes to encourage more interdisciplinary discussion of such everyday topics, building on an appreciation of the increasingly blurred line between traditionally separate scientific and artistic endeavours. We hope to excite, encourage and enable students to join us in this urgent and fascinating dialogue through seminars, events and conferences. If anyone knows postgrads in any academic discipline who might be suitable to join the steering committee, please contact Max Berghege at maxberghege@gmail.com

The Memory Network awarded £10,000 Research Grant

After spending time setting up the South East Asian branch of the Memory Network earlier this year, the Principal Investigator of the Memory Network, Dr Sebastian Groes, has received a research grant from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) of RM 37,000 (roughly £10,000) to organise a conference that explores memory in a contemporary Malaysian context. Groes will be working in partnership with Professor Ruzy Hashim, Head of Department of Language Studies and Linguistics of UKM. The grant has been made available as part of the ‘Understanding the Contemporary Malay Culture’ research project.

The conference will explore Malaysia’s rapid economic growth since the 1980s, which has triggered enormous economic and cultural changes, and led to urgent questions about the changing nature of the country and the lives of its citizens, as well as the condition of local and national history, identity and cultural memory and heritage. Not only has there been a radical renegotiation of the nature-city balance but, just as in the West, obesity has become one of the main health issues in Malaysia today. The conference will explore memory both at the level of the individual, subjective self and in our sense of collective and cultural memory. Keynote speakers include Professor of Psycholinguistics Asifa Majid (Radboud University, the Netherlands), writer and broadcaster Sharaad Kuttan, and novelist Tash Aw. The University of Roehampton’s Lecturer in Photography Paul Antick will deliver a paper on his experience of the ever-changing Kuala Lumpur, and deliver visual work to a joint exhibition.

The conference will lead to the second book published by the Memory Network, to be edited by Groes and Hashim. For more information, please see the conference poster or email Nick Lavery at memorynetwork@roehampton.ac.uk