Our institute is part of a wider research landscape concerned with cultural identity, memory, heritage, and collective remembrance. On this page, we highlight selected UK-based and international networks and institutes working in memory studies which are are connected to our institute through individual researchers and events.
Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform (FMSP) was founded in 2011 by Astrid Erll. It is an initiative of the Forschungszentrum für Historische Geisteswissenschaften (FzHG). It brings together people and projects from history, sociology, literature, arts, media studies, psychology, and other relevant disciplines in a dialogue about memory. Its work is organised around three main research lines: transcultural memory, the mediality of memory, and memory and narrative. FMSP wants to shape the future of memory studies by developing and discussing new research questions and new methodologies.
The Memory Studies Association (MSA) aims to be a professional association for Memory Studies scholars, as well as those who are active in museums, memorial institutions, archives, the arts and other fields engaged in remembrance. The objective is to become the most important forum for the memory field; both through an annual, international and interdisciplinary conference and through a strong online presence. Furthermore, the MSA seeks to foster politically and civically engaged scholarship by publicly voicing concerns about political uses of the past.
Drawing on expertise from across the University of Glasgow, Memory Lab explores how memories are made, stored, and later retrieved by individuals, and what impact they have. A key focus is to understand what happens when this process is brought into the context of group or social memory, and how it manifests as collective or cultural memory. By bringing together history, literature, education theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Memory Lab creates a unique forum for conversations about social, cultural, and individual memories.
The Centre for Memory Studies (CMS) offers an interdisciplinary examination of memory and forms of forgetting, exploring cultural, psychological, medical, and machinic vectors that shape these processes. Through the interfaces of narratives, neural mechanisms, and machinic entanglements, the Centre connects historical, social, and cultural events with collaborations in cognition, embodiment, and technology. Examining the politics of re-membering and forgetting at neural-machinic and extended-cultural levels, it offers a complex engagement with acts of reconstruction.
The Slow Memory Action Group addresses the need for increased interdisciplinarity in understanding how societies confront their past to contend with environmental, economic, and social change. In response to urgency, crisis, and acceleration, it focuses on forms of remembrance that require slowing down research methods and attending to multi-sited, eventless, and slow-moving phenomena. Funded by COST, supporting research and innovation networks, the Action connects scholars, policymakers, and cultural professionals across Europe and beyond to explore alternative forms of social remembering.
Founded by Ann Rigney, the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies offers an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working in the field of cultural memory. It focuses on new ways of exploring the transnational and transmedial dynamics of cultural memory in a globalising world, the complex history of memory cultures, and the role of memory practices in international conflict and conflict resolution. By bringing these perspectives together, the Forum supports exchange on how memory is mediated and contested across cultural and political contexts.