Dr Avishek Parui and Dr Merin Simi Raj (Memory Studies Research Network, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras): ‘Encoding, Effacing, and the Phenomenon of Forgetting’
The talk will examine the neural and narrative mechanisms of memory in terms of examining it as an enactive process which incorporates encoding as well as effacement, sometimes simultaneously. It will explore how this enactive model may be mapped on the self/mind as well as the cultural/political parameters of memory and how fiction can offer a complex medium for the same.
Wednesday, 18 November, 12-1:30 (GMT). On Teams. All are welcome
Avishek Parui (PhD, Durham, UK) is Assistant Professor in English at IIT Madras and Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. His research interests include Memory Studies, Cognitive Theory, Masculinity Studies, and Critical Theory. He is the author of Postmodern Literatures (Orient Blackswan, 2018) and is currently contracted with Rowman & Littlefield for his second book titled Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory. He is the Principal Investigator of a project titled Sleepless Cities and is one of the faculty coordinators of the Memory Studies Research Network, at IIT Madras.
Merin Simi Raj (PhD, IIT Bombay) is Assistant Professor in English at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Faculty Coordinator, Memory Studies Research Network IIT Madras along with Dr Avishek Parui. Her research interests include Memory Studies, Historiography and modernity studies and Digital Humanities. She was the Principal Investigator of an Exploratory Research Project titled ‘A transnational narrative history of the Anglo-Indian community in India and the Diaspora’. An edited volume Anglo-Indian Identity (co-edited with Dr Robyn Andrews, and to be published by Palgrave Macmillan) is expected to be available in print by early 2021.