This event seeks to connect scholars interested in aspects of memory studies at different institutions in our region and to explore the potential for joint events/collaborations.

The seminar will comprise a series of mini-presentations to showcase the work of regional memory groups and their current research programmes and to inspire discussions and ideas for the future.

We would therefore like to retain names and e-mail addresses of all participants to continue the conversation beyond this event and for future projects.

Presentations include:

Relationality, Memory and Migration

• Sara Jones (Professor of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Mónica Jato (Reader in Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Maria Roca Lizarazu (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Birmingham)

Approaches to Memory Studies/ Current projects at Nottingham Trent University

• Jenny Wüstenberg (Associate Professor in Twentieth Century History at Nottingham Trent University)

Memory Studies and Politics of Memory, Memory Studies at UoN

• Ute Hirsekorn (Assistant Professor of German Studies, University of Nottingham)

Speaker biographies:

Sara Jones is Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham and an internationally established memory studies scholar. She is author of Complicity Censorship and Criticism (Berlin, 2011) and The Media of Testimony (Basingstoke, 2014). She is currently working on a monograph that explores the triangle of relationality, transnational co-operation and memory work.

Mónica Jato is a Reader in Hispanic Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century Spanish peninsular literature and culture, including post-civil war poetry, exile literature and women’s autobiographical writing. Her recent books include El exodo espanol de 1939: Un topologia cultural del exilio (Leiden, 2019) and Fractured Frontiers (New York, 2020)

Maria Roca Lizarazu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham whose research focuses on Holocaust memory, trauma and migration in German literature. She is author of Renegotiating Postmemory (New York, 2020).

Jenny Wüstenberg Associate Professor of Twentieth Century History at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (CUP 2017, German edition 2020). Her research interests revolve around memory activism and politics in Germany, Europe, settler colonial societies, and in transnational networks. Her most recent project examines the comparative remembrance of family separation policies. Jenny is the co-founder and Co-President of the Memory Studies Association.

Ute Hirsekorn is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Nottingham and is chairing the event on behalf of the Memory Studies and Politics of Memory research group in the School of Culture Languages and Area Studies. She is a memory scholar with an interest in post-socialist memory and memory politics. Her research focuses on autobiographical texts and interviews.