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On 6 September 2014, University College London hosts a new Science and Literature Festival organised by The Memory Network: ‘MEMORY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY’, featuring, in conversation:

• Ian McEwan & Paul Bloom (Yale, USA) • Suzanne Corkin (MIT, USA) & Hugo Spiers (UCL)

• Maud Casey, Timothy J. Jarvis & Sebastian Groes (Roehampton)

• Anna Stothard & Jason Tougaw (CUNY, USA)

• Naomi Alderman & Jessica Bland (Nesta)

In association with The Guardian, The Memory Network is organising a festival at which writers will discuss the relationship between storytelling and memory in dialogue with a neuroscientist, technology futures specialist, and a neuro-literary critic. How does the digital environment change our memory and storytelling? Can you tell a story via objects? In what ways is psychiatry dependent on fictional narratives? How can we turn the life of an amnesiac man into a story worth remembering? These and many other questions will be debated, whilst neuropsychologist Paul Bloom will interrogate one of the finest, and most provocative, contemporary writers who throughout his career has sought to realign the fraught relationship between literature and science: Ian McEwan.
The literary festival will be held in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre at UCL, starts at 12.30. The programme finishes at 6pm. Entry is free but seats must be reserved by sending an email to memorynetwork@roehampton.ac.uk

For more information, please visit www.thememorynetwork.com

The Story of Memory Conference: Exploring New Perspectives on the Relationship between Storytelling and Memory in the Twenty-First Century

The University of Roehampton, UK: 4-5 September, 2014

Invited speakers include:

• Paul Bloom (Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale)
• Suzanne Corkin (Neuroscience, MIT)
• Mark Currie (English Literature, QMUL)
• Asifa Majid (Psycholinguistics, Radboud)
• Martijn Meeter (Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
• Jamie Tehrani (Anthropology, Durham)

The Story of Memory seeks to pose new questions about the relationship between the senses, cognition, memory, and emotion, and to reinvigorate the debate about the return to a critical investigation of story telling in the twenty-first century.

We invite papers that consider the following questions across disciplines:

• How does storytelling shape our memories and identity in new ways, and how is narrative involved in the conceptualization of memory across disciplines?
• How do culturally specific storytelling traditions change and inflect memory processes differently?
• In what new ways is therapeutic storytelling used as an intervention in cases of psychological trauma?
• How do non-verbal modes (including architecture and music) tell stories?
• What is the role of the senses in storytelling?
• Can there be a story in the medium of taste or smell?
• How do disciplines not necessarily close to literature and linguistics narrate knowledge differently, and how can the Humanities rethink traditional narratological frameworks through the different story-forms generated by other disciplines?
• How do new influences create new, and reshape existing, genres such as (auto)biography and life-writing (i.e., brain memoirs; e.g. Hustvedt, Shulman, McCrum)?
• Neuroscientists too have turned their attention to how the brain uses narrative to integrate the senses, emotion and memory into the experiential self, so what can the ‘harder’ sciences learn from frameworks offered by disciplines in the Humanities ?
• How does the changing form of stories in the age of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, and Storify shape our sense of selfhood?
• How do we narrate and curate (online) archives, and the bulk collection of data?
• What are the ethical questions that new forms of story telling generate?

Please send all enquiries, as well as 250-word proposals for 25 minute papers, or 600-word proposals for special panels consisting of 3 papers, and a brief bio-note, to memorynetwork@roehampton.ac.uk by 8 August 2014.

Registration for the conference is now open at http://estore.roehampton.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=136

In partnership with the Guardian, the MN will also be hosting a literary festival, featuring speakers including Ian McEwan, on the 6 September. More details will be up soon.