Events

5 Dec 2024 14-17
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadama 5, M-213

Yuliya Yurchuk, Södertörn University, Sweden
Decolonial Approach to Memory Studies in Ukraine
Valentyna Kharkhun, Tallinn University / Nizhyn Mykola Gogol State University, Ukraine
Decolonization in Action: Dealing with (Un)wanted Heritage During the Russo-Ukrainian War
Discussant: Linda Kaljundi

Yuliya Yurchuk
Decolonial Approach to Memory Studies in Ukraine
Decolonization in relation to Ukraine started to be discussed intensively with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The scholarly discussions began much earlier, but public discussions became viral after the invasion. Despite the wide usage of the word “decolonization,” there is a limited shared understanding of what decolonization means in practice. In this presentation, I will try to understand what decolonization in the field of memory means. Memory as a narrative about one’s past is central to decolonial thinking. The possibility of reclaiming one’s own (hi)story is central to the resistance to epistemic violence created by the coloniality of power. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world”. The question of decolonization of memory is thus inextricably linked to the desire to connect to one’s own history. The fundamental role of history in the process of decolonization is indeed mentioned by many decolonial writers. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o mentioned that decolonization means “seeing oneself clearly” (1986) which involves having a clearer narrative of one’s own past, removing the distorting lenses of colonial alienation. Jill Jarvis, in her “Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony Memory,” also writes about decolonization as a possibility to “see or hear what history has rendered ghostly” (2021). Connecting to one’s own history becomes then part of a decolonial project of liberation. But how is it possible to “see and hear” clearly what has been forgotten, erased, or, indeed, never fully re-constructed in memory?I argue that decolonization of memory in Ukraine is driven by three main logics: reclamation, decanonization, and memory activism. These logics do not exclude each other and very often work together in producing memory work that can be seen through the perspective of decolonization.

Valetyna Kharkhun
Decolonization in Action: Dealing with (Un)wanted Heritage During the Russo-Ukrainian War
In applying the concepts of “political iconoclasm” and “urban fallism”, this presentation provides an analysis of “Leninfall” and “Pushkinfall” as two major phenomena of dealing with monumental heritage in Ukraine since 1990. The paper focuses particularly on the last decade between 2014 and 2024, the Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian cases of monumental political iconoclasm will be viewed within the context of decommunization and derussification, two identifiable trends in Ukraine’s current politics of memory, which exemplify decolonization as being the primary method in opposing Russian aggression, for remodeling the Ukrainian cultural space, and ultimately in strengthening Ukrainian national identity by eliminating Soviet and Russian imperial domination. This presentation delves into the following questions: What are the political, economic and cultural circumstances which forced a reconsideration of the (un)wanted heritage and eventually led to the toppling and destruction of monuments? What indicative actions have the various state bodies and grass-rooted initiatives had in deciding the fate of contested monuments? How does decolonization of a public space mirror contemporary identity politics? And what makes Ukraine’s undertakings with monumental heritage unique in comparison with other concurrent cases of political iconoclasm? Ultimately, this presentation should contribute to the understanding of Russia’s war in Ukraine within the framework of (de)colonization, as a struggle between Russia’s political and cultural imperialism embodied within the Lenin and Pushkin monuments and Ukraine’s intentions to build an independent and democratic future.

Yuliya Yurchuk, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research encompasses memory studies, religious history, and intellectual history. Her research includes projects on memory politics in Ukraine, propaganda and uses of history in Russian-Ukrainian war as well as religion and politics in Ukraine. Now she works on transnational intellectual history that deals with the circulation of ideas in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and the questions of Ukrainian resilience, resistance, and decolonization of memory in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. 

Valentyna Kharkhun is a professor at Nizhyn Mykola Gogol State University (Ukraine). She is an author of two books, six textbooks and more than one hundred articles published in Ukrainian and international journals such as Nationalities Papers, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Krytyka and other. She has participated in two Fulbright fellowships (Pennsylvania State University, 2005-2006; Columbia University, 2011-2012), the J. Mianovsky and Queen Jadwiga fellowships at Jagellonian University, Poland (2008, 2009), the Ivan Vyhovsky fellowship at Warsaw University, University of Rzeszow and Maria Curie-Sklodowska University (2014-2015), the George F. Kennan fellowship (Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, 2016), the Stuart Ramsey Tompkins Professorship (University of Alberta, Canada, 2023), Memory Studies fellowship (“Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena,” Tallinn University, Estonia, 2024). Through her career, she has worked on the relationship between ideology and culture focusing on the following topics: Ukrainian modernist writings; the art under Soviet rule; the socialist realist canon in Ukrainian and Russian literatures; representation of communism in museums of Central and Eastern European countries. Currently, she is working on a book entitled Multi-faceted Memory: Exhibiting the Soviet Era in Ukrainian Museums.

Linda Kaljundi is a historian and curator, Professor of Cultural history at Estonian Academy of Arts and Senior Research Fellow at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Kaljundi has published on Baltic and Nordic history and historiography, collective memory and nation building, as well as the entangled histories of environment, colonialism and science. She has also co-curated a number of interdisciplinary exhibitions, including The Conqueror’s Eye (2019), Art or Science (2022), and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023), all at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. She has co-edited several article collections and exhibition catalogues, as well as published a monograph on visual culture as a medium of cultural memory (History in Images – Image in History: National and Transnational Past in Estonian Art, with Tiina-Mall Kreem, 2018).

Guido Bartolini, Ghent University 

What Happened to Italian Fascism? Placing the Study of Fascist Italy in Memory Studies’ Research 
10 May 2024 16.00 in room M-649, Tallinn University

 In 2005, Enzo Traverso argued that a problematic trend was affecting European culture; while the notion of totalitarianism was spreading, there was a progressive “disparition de la notion de ‘fascism’ du champ historiographique” [disappearance of the concept of ‘fascism’ from historiography]. Nearly twenty years later, with the worrying rise of far-right and populist movements around the world, the landscape has changed drastically, and discussions about fascism and its possible resurgence have gained momentum. Within the current cultural and political landscape, the Italian context can offer some interesting points of reflection for anyone interested in questions of memory. On the one hand, as the birthplace of the first Fascist movement, Italy has a long tradition of dealing with its dictatorial past, especially through cultural mediation; on the other hand, scholars and memory activists have often criticised the country’s collective memory, arguing that Italy has failed to come to terms with its Fascist past. In this talk, I will examine some of the main trends and debates that have characterised Italian memory culture, discussing them from the perspective of transnational memory studies and cultural memory studies. The talk will show that by conceptualising many of the shortcomings of Italian memory through theories of responsibility, complicity, and implication, it is possible to gain important insights into the process of dealing with the past, which are relevant for understanding the relationship between the present and the past beyond Italian culture.

Guido Bartolini is a FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and the idea of responsibility for the past. He has published articles on the representation of Fascism and World War II in Italian literature and cinema. He is the author of The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan: 2021) and the co-editor of Fascism in Italian Culture: 1945-2023 (a special issue of the journal Annali d’Italianistica, 2023) and Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures (forthcoming with De Gruyter in July 2024). He co-chairs the Memory Studies AssociationWorking Group on Memory and Literature.

Friday, 17 November

14:00 – Visit to the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia

16:00 – Coffeebreak

16:30-17:45 – Keynote adress (open to public, M-213)

“Constellating the Past and Present: Towards a Theory of Audiovisual Counterhegemonic History Writing” Professor Alison Landsberg (Department of History and Art History, George Mason University)

18:30 – Dinner

Saturday, 18 November

09.30-11.15 – Panel 1: Legibility of the Archives: (Trans)national Tensions and Local Histories

“Soviet Film History without Russia: Reconsidering the Archives of Soviet Cinema” (Raisa Sidenova, Media, Culture and Heritage, Newcastle University)

“Unpacking my Archival Findings: Thoughts on the Chaos of Memory and Archival Resistance to Historical Legibility” (Ana Grgić, Department of Cinema and Media, Babeș-Bolyai University)

“Distant Journey through the Desktop: The Ethics of Approaching Holocaust Footage in the Online Space” (Jiří Anger, Queen Mary University of London / National Film Archive in Prague)

11:15-11:45 – Coffee Break

11:45-13:00 – Keynote address (open to public, M-213)

“The Role of Film Archives in Creating the Canons of Eastern European Cinema” Professor Ewa Mazierska (School of Arts and Media, University of Central Lancashire)

13:00-14:00 – Lunch

14.00-15:15 – Panel 2 (Re)constructing History and Memory through the Archives

“Translating Memories Through Appropriated Archival Footage from Fiction Films” (Martin Palúch, Institute of Theatre and Film Research of The Art Research Centre, Slovak Academy of Sciences)

“The Shadow of Oru Palace. The clash of narratives at the site of a national monument” (Aap Tepper, Film Archives, The National Archives of Estonia)

15:15-15:45 – Coffee Break

15:45-17:00 – Panel 3 Institutional and Legal Context of Private and Public Archives 

“Revisiting Private Memories in Hungary – The Case of the Private Photo and Film Foundation” (Lucy Szemetová, University of St Andrews)

“The Drama of Legislation: Regulating Access to the National Film Archive in Romania” (Diana Popa, Tallinn University)

17:00-17:30 – General Discussion

18:30 – Optional: Film screening (PÖFF – Black Nights Film Festival)

More than thirty years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine brought Eastern Europe to global attention. As Roma Sendyka (2022) recently noted, Eastern Europe today confronts the global arena with a new multivocal discourse shaped by the voices of students, doctoral candidates, young scholars and artists that demands a decolonial view of the region. This workshop proposes to take up this call to decolonise the Eastern European past from the joint perspective of visual media (broadly understood) and memory studies. It aims to map a theoretical and practice-based view of the region’s past and memory by focusing on Eastern European audio-visual archives and valorising the recent proliferation of artistic practices of archival appropriation in film and film adjacent media in the region.

Organizers:

Tallinn University, ERC project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the
Global Arena
Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia

2nd PoSoCoMeS Conference
20-23 September 2023, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
Please see the programme and register here

The Post-Socialist and Comparative Memory Studies (PoSoCoMeS) working group is part of the Memory Studies Association. Our goal is to bring together researchers, activists, and practitioners working in and on post-socialist countries. We call for trans-regional comparative studies that connect Eastern Europe and Africa, Latin America and Asia, and result in broad conceptualizations of post-socialist memories.

Post-socialist and Eastern European memory studies have been thrown into crisis by the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. On the one hand, the war has belied the “never again” of historical violence, state terror, rape and torture in the region. On the other, it has highlighted the continued importance of the scrutiny of the ways in which historical narratives about the past are weaponized by present political leaders to justify new waves of historical violence and state terror.
In this conference, we aim to explore change in post-socialist memory cultures, with a particular focus on Eastern, Central and South Eastern European memory cultures that emerged/are emerging from the tensions and interactions between the transnational, the regional, the national and the local and are further exacerbated by the Russian destructive military invasion of Ukraine. Possible topics include:
– uses and abuses of memory in contemporary and ongoing conflicts, weaponization of the past (especially in the context of the war in Ukraine)
– transnational memory in the post-socialist world: vernacularisation, encapsulation
tangled relationships between memory and human rights
– politics of memory: key agents and institutions
– the workings of memory in relation to (new) social challenges: climate crisis, migration, social inequality
– regional regimes of memory: post-socialism as a regime of memory, continuities and/or re-formations, memory traffic within post-socialist space
– reconfiguration of the borders between communities
– memory and translation: movement of memories across national and regional borders, forms and templates
– media of memory (film, literature, memorial museums, commemorative practices), remediation
– new forms of digital memorialisation in the post-pandemic era
post-socialist/post-communist memory culture in relation to the rest of the world: post-socialist comparisons with other parts of the world, to allow for trans-regional comparative studies that connect Eastern Europe and Africa, Latin America and Asia and result in broad conceptualizations of post-socialist memories

The keynote speakers are:
Erica Lehrer (Concordia University, Canada)
Maria Mälksoo (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Andrea Petö (Central European University, Austria)
Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Centre for East European and International Studies, Germany)
Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw, Poland)

There will be two special streams that focus on the themes of the co-organizing research projects.

Mnemonic Pluralism and Critical Dialogue in the Museum
Through the concept of mnemonic pluralism, which links memory to the principles of democratic pluralism, this special stream explores the ways museums deal with the complexities of the 20th century and the multiplicity of competing perceptions of the past in changing political and socio-economic contexts. It aims to establish the factors that undermine or support mnemonic pluralism and reflexive, critical engagement with the complexities of the past: how are the politically laden periods represented in exhibitions and related public programs as well as in collecting work? How are dissonance and difference (ethnic, national, generational, gender, class) addressed? How are divergent group-specific, local, national, and transnational mnemonic discourses linked to each other? What is the relationship between the emergence of pluralistic and deliberative curatorial practices and the museum’s positioning in trans/national and local memoryscapes and vis-à-vis societal challenges? How are the choices of curators, designers, and educators related to their backgrounds as members of memory communities.

Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena
This stream focuses on interconnections between local, national, regional, and global memory cultures in post-socialist countries and their transnationalisation. It is particularly interested in aesthetic media of memory, such as literature, art, cinema, and memorial museums/monuments, that circulate globally and bring local memories to global audiences. This stream explores the attempts in these media to make the histories of the Second World War and Socialist regimes known globally. The stream proposes to look at these movements of memory as a process of translation. What memorial forms have been used to make the Eastern European past intelligible in the global arena? How are global memory cultures vernacularised in the region? What is gained and what is lost in this translation?

Formats
This is an in-person conference. We will be able to accommodate only a limited number of online panels.

Cost and financial support
We do not ask for any registration fee, but all participants have to be members of the Memory Studies Association. Exceptions for those in need are possible, but they have to applied for directly through the Memory Studies Association
Travel and accommodation for our participants from Ukraine is provided by the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

Organisers
The 2nd PoSoCoMeS conference will be organized by two major memory studies research projects in Estonia, in collaboration with PoSoCoMes: “Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena”, a European Research Council Grant that has received funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Tallinn University, project leader Eneken Laanes, grant agreement 853385), and “Practices and Challenges of Mnemonic Pluralism in Baltic History Museums”, funded by the Estonian Research Agency (University of Tartu, project leader Ene Kõresaar).
Contact: posocomesconference@tlu.ee

Ilya Lensky, Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives

4 May 2023, 14.15 in M213 and online
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadam 5
Please register here

Holocaust commemoration has started in Latvia immediately after the WWII, but under Soviets it has been largely inofficial, or strictly regulated by the state-imposed constraints. With the beginning of Latvia’s national movement for independance, and reestablishement of Jewish community life, Holocaust topic started more and more appearing in the public space. Jewish community members, as well as non-Jewish historians and memory activists would be organizing ceremonies, installing memorial signs, publishing articles and books.
This trend continued all through 1990s, with the major changes occuring after 1998, when Presidential Comission of Historians undertook the duty of comprehensive research of Holocaust in Latvia. This period saw also the construction of major Holocaust memorials and demarcation of Holocaust sites, often with foreign financial support. Situation has been developing in 2010s, with new/young generation developing new approaches to commemoration, sometimes developing under influence of practices, “spotted” abroad, and also basing their strive for memory more on popular culture and previous research, than on direct family or communal memory.
In our lecture we will explore different stories of commemoration, trying to outline major trends, and discussing the possible perspectives.

Ilya Lensky is the Director of the Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia

14 February 2023, 16.00 (EET)
Kristo Nurmis, Tallinn University
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–44

14 March 2023, 16.00 (EET)
Dina Iordanova, University of St Andrews
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations

6 April 2023, 14.15 (EET)
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 

4 May 2023, 17.00 (EET)
Ilya Lensky, Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives

Kristo Nurmis
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–1944
My paper challenges the traditional Nazi-centric view of studying Baltic discourses about communism during WWII by examining the agency and self-mobilization of the Baltic people under Nazi rule and how they made sense of the first Soviet year (1940–41). Focusing on the relationship between Nazi institutions and local actors, I argue that local initiatives and discourses, sometimes contradictory to official Nazi propaganda (and sometimes inspiring the latter), played a significant role in shaping Baltic memory culture about communism. Today’s Baltic memory culture about Soviet rule, I contend, was already forged to a significant extent during the war.
Kristo Nurmis is a historian and research fellow at Tallinn University School of Humanities. He holds a PhD in Russian and Eastern European history from Stanford University and a BA and MA from the University of Tartu. He has several publications on Soviet and Nazi rule in the Baltics and is currently working on a book project on the politics of legitimacy and mass influence in Soviet- and Nazi-occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, 1939–53. 

Dina Iordanova
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations
A visit to the coastal city of Izmir early in 2023 brought up memories of the centennial related to the place. In Turkey, it was marked as a day of the city’s liberation, whilst, in Greece, it was commemorated mainly through references to ethnic cleansing and catastrophe. Even Wikipedia carries two differently slanted articles on the topic, both related to the same event but not interlinked online. Occasional cultural historians and filmmakers from either country have tried to complicate the narrative for a more comprehensive understanding. A meaningful dialogue is still to materialize, though. Elsewhere, the 1922 centennial remained largely unmentioned (as has been, generally, the case with the centennial of the end of the Ottoman Empire). Indeed, the silence over the unreconciled and awkward moments in history, like this one, is deafening. In this talk, l would like to present a case study of the hushed memories related to Smyrna/Izmir and connect it to more general matters of reconciling narratives, vicious circles, and historical memory.
Dina Iordanova is Professor Emeritus of Global Cinema at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. A native of Bulgaria, she has worked internationally for three decades now and has published mainly on Balkan and East European film history as well as on the cinema of the former Soviet Union, as well as East Asia. She is also a leading specialist on global film festivals and has served on many international festival juries, both for feature and documentary. For this talk, she builds on work related to Balkan memory studies published over the last two decades. 

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 
One of the particular and constitutive features of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a memory region is its double experience of two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism, with Stalinism as the extreme expression of the latter. The history of these two dictatorships became entangled in the region in a unique way and resulted in a multiplicity of painful and often conflicting memories. In consequence, handling the crimes of Nazism and Communism, epitomized by the concepts of Auschwitz and Gulag, respectively, became, after the fall of Communism in 1989-1991, an immense challenge for memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. This lecture will shortly review how the societies in the region have wrestled with these issues. Additionally, it will aim to explain why the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Gulag is an object for political struggles and still constitutes a dividing line between memory cultures of the Western and Eastern members of the European Union. 
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In the years 2005-2017, she was the head of the Centre for European Studies in Lund, and, since 2018, she has been dean of research at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Her main research interests are nationalism, identity and memory politics in Eastern and Central Europe. She has participated in many international research projects in the field of memory studies; for example, in the years 2012-2016, she was the leader of the large research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” (financed by the EU’s COST-programme), and, in the years 2017-2020, she was co-leader of a Nordic research network on “Historical Trauma Studies”, Nordic Research Council. She is the editor and author of a number of books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish. Among them: The Twentieth Century in European Memory, Amsterdam 2017, and Disputed Memory. Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, Berlin/Boston 2016 (both edited with Tea Sindbaek Andersen), and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (New York-London 2016).

Ilya Lensky
Holocaust Remembrance in Latvia Since 1988: Actors, Stories, Perspectives
Holocaust commemoration has started in Latvia immediately after the WWII, but under Soviets it has been largely inofficial, or strictly regulated by the state-imposed constraints. With the beginning of Latvia’s national movement for independance, and reestablishement of Jewish community life, Holocaust topic started more and more appearing in the public space. Jewish community members, as well as non-Jewish historians and memory activists would be organizing ceremonies, installing memorial signs, publishing articles and books.
This trend continued all through 1990s, with the major changes occuring after 1998, when Presidential Comission of Historians undertook the duty of comprehensive research of Holocaust in Latvia. This period saw also the construction of major Holocaust memorials and demarcation of Holocaust sites, often with foreign financial support. Situation has been developing in 2010s, with new/young generation developing new approaches to commemoration, sometimes developing under influence of practices, “spotted” abroad, and also basing their strive for memory more on popular culture and previous research, than on direct family or communal memory.
In our lecture we will explore different stories of commemoration, trying to outline major trends, and discussing the possible perspectives.

Ilya Lensky is the Director of the Museum “Jews in Latvia”, Riga, Latvia

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University
Auschwitz versus Gulag – An Ongoing Tension in the Memory Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe

6 April 2023, 14.15 in M134
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadam 5

One of the particular and constitutive features of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a memory region is its double experience of two totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism, with Stalinism as the extreme expression of the latter. The history of these two dictatorships became entangled in the region in a unique way and resulted in a multiplicity of painful and often conflicting memories. In consequence, handling the crimes of Nazism and Communism, epitomized by the concepts of Auschwitz and Gulag, respectively, became, after the fall of Communism in 1989-1991, an immense challenge for memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. This lecture will shortly review how the societies in the region have wrestled with these issues. Additionally, it will aim to explain why the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Gulag is an object for political struggles and still constitutes a dividing line between memory cultures of the Western and Eastern members of the European Union.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In the years 2005-2017, she was the head of the Centre for European Studies in Lund, and, since 2018, she has been dean of research at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Her main research interests are nationalism, identity and memory politics in Eastern and Central Europe. She has participated in many international research projects in the field of memory studies; for example, in the years 2012-2016, she was the leader of the large research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” (financed by the EU’s COST-programme), and, in the years 2017-2020, she was co-leader of a Nordic research network on “Historical Trauma Studies”, Nordic Research Council. She is the editor and author of a number of books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish. Among them: The Twentieth Century in European Memory, Amsterdam 2017, and Disputed Memory. Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, Berlin/Boston 2016 (both edited with Tea Sindbaek Andersen), and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (New York-London 2016).

Dina Iordanova, University of St Andrews
A Walk On the Waterfront: Hushed Memories and Impossible Conversations

14 March 2023, 16.00
Tallinn University, Uus-Sadama 5, M-648
Please register here

A visit to the coastal city of Izmir early in 2023 brought up memories of the centennial related to the place. In Turkey, it was marked as a day of the city’s liberation, whilst, in Greece, it was commemorated mainly through references to ethnic cleansing and catastrophe. Even Wikipedia carries two differently slanted articles on the topic, both related to the same event but not interlinked online. Occasional cultural historians and filmmakers from either country have tried to complicate the narrative for a more comprehensive understanding. A meaningful dialogue is still to materialize, though. Elsewhere, the 1922 centennial remained largely unmentioned (as has been, generally, the case with the centennial of the end of the Ottoman Empire). Indeed, the silence over the unreconciled and awkward moments in history, like this one, is deafening. In this talk, l would like to present a case study of the hushed memories related to Smyrna/Izmir and connect it to more general matters of reconciling narratives, vicious circles, and historical memory.

Dina Iordanova is Professor Emeritus of Global Cinema at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. A native of Bulgaria, she has worked internationally for three decades now and has published mainly on Balkan and East European film history as well as on the cinema of the former Soviet Union, as well as East Asia. She is also a leading specialist on global film festivals and has served on many international festival juries, both for feature and documentary. For this talk, she builds on work related to Balkan memory studies published over the last two decades

Kristo Nurmis, Tallinn University
First Draft of Memory: Reactions to Communism in Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941–44

14 February 2023 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia, online

My paper challenges the traditional Nazi-centric view of studying Baltic discourses about communism during WWII by examining the agency and self-mobilization of the Baltic people under Nazi rule and how they made sense of the first Soviet year (1940–41). Focusing on the relationship between Nazi institutions and local actors, I argue that local initiatives and discourses, sometimes contradictory to official Nazi propaganda (and sometimes inspiring the latter), played a significant role in shaping the Baltic memory culture about communism. Today’s Baltic memory culture about Soviet rule, I contend, was forged to a significant extent already during the war.

Kristo Nurmis is a historian and research fellow at Tallinn University School of Humanities. He holds a PhD in Russian and Eastern European history from Stanford University and a BA and MA from the University of Tartu. He has several publications on Soviet and Nazi rule in the Baltics, and is currently working on a book project on the politics of legitimacy and mass influence in the Soviet and Nazi occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, 1939–53.

Taking place from 11-15 July 2022 in Roosta, Estonia, ‘Translating Memories in Literature, Film, Museums, and Monuments’, the Eastern European Memory Studies Summer School will combine keynote lectures, presentations, and field trips with the opportunity to present your research to a panel of academics and peers.
The ‘Translating Memories’ project focuses on how memorial forms and acts of memory are translated across, between and beyond post-socialist Eastern Europe, as well as how the arts and memory practices can potentially redraw boundaries within and beyond the region. Thus, invited experts studying media including literature, film, museums, and monuments will present on a wide range of forms, receptions, and transformations in the region from 1991 to the present day.
Possible topics include, but are certainly not restricted to, the following:

● the tensions between the local and the global in the production, circulation and reception of various acts of memory
● the aesthetic strategies and narrative and visual tropes employed by acts of memory to translate locally specific cultural and historical events for global audiences
● the intervention of aesthetic media of memory and curatorial practices in the politics of memory in Eastern Europe
● the use of archival materials and the role of archives in literature, films, museums and monuments, as well as the interplay between fact and fiction in remembering the past in these media of memory

We welcome applications from PhD students studying relevant topics in fields across the social sciences and humanities, including (but not limited to) literature, history, film studies, heritage studies, memory studies, and Slavic studies.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Zuzanna Bogumił (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Veronika Pehe (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Kevin M. F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (German Historical Institute Warsaw)
Mitja Velikonja (University of Ljubljana)

Programme
Monday, 11 July
09.30 Optional monument tour to Maarjamäe in Tallinn (meeting at Uus-Sadama 5)
13.00 Departure from Tallinn University to Roosta (meeting at Uus-Sadama 5)
14.00 Visit to the site of Klooga concentration camp
16.00 Arrival in Roosta
16.30-18.00 Keynote: Zuzanna Bogumił, Contested Past Commemorated: On the Postsecular Memory of Soviet Repressions in Russia and Eastern Europe
19.00 Dinner

Tuesday, 12 July
09.30-11.00 Panel 1: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting 1
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Keynote: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Cultural Memory: How It’s Made?
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.30 Panel 2: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting 2
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.30 Panel 3: Texts, Practices, Identities
19.00 Dinner
Film Night

Wednesday, 13 July
09.30-11.00 Keynote: Kevin Platt, Post-Socialist Post-Colonies and the Ruins of Global History
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Panel 4: Human Rights and Difficult Heritage
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00 Field trip to Haapsalu
19.00 Dinner

Thursday, 14 July
9.30-11.00 Panel 5: Visual Rhetoric and Transformation of Meaning
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Keynote: Veronika Pehe, The “Wild 1990s” on Film and Television. Remembering the Postsocialist Economic Transformations in Central Europe.
13.00-15.00 Lunch
15.00-16.30 Roundtable: The Future of Memory Studies After the War in Ukraine
Speakers: Zuzanna Bogumił, Margaret Comer, Irina Paert
19.00 Dinner
Film Night

Friday, 15 July
09.30-11.00 Panel 6: Memories of Socialist Pasts
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-13.00 Keynote: Mitja Velikonja, Yugoslavia after Yugoslavia – Graffiti about Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Urbanscape
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-16.00 Travel to Tallinn
16.00 Graffiti Tour in Tallinn

Panel 1: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting I
Discussant: Kevin Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
Rezeda Lykkorpi (University of Greifswald), “Königsberg Is Not Forgotten: Exhibiting German Past in Kaliningrad Museums”
Bernadette Ščasná (Tallinn University), “Memories of the Expulsion of Germans in Czech Literature Throughout Generations”
Aleksandra Guja (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), “Contemporary Visual Stereotypes of Jews in Poland and Their Historical Sources”

Panel 2: Remembering / Forgetting / Omitting II
Discussant: Zuzanna Bogumił (Institute of Archeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Alsena Kokalari (European University Institute), “Measuring Memory Museums in Central and Eastern Europe Countries: creating a context-dependent dictionary”
Kristina Zmejauskaite (Dublin City University), “A Walk Through Vilnius Now and Then: Soviet Memory in Public Spaces”
Aleksandra Kumala (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), “Unrecognized Victimhood. Homosexual Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps in the Right-Wing Media Narratives in Poland”

Panel 3: Texts, Practices, Identities
Discussant: Mitja Velikonja (University of Ljubljana)
Maria Plichta (University of Amsterdam), ““Fake Fog and Suspicious Doppelgängers: Conspiratorial Narratives around the Smoleńsk Catastrophe”
Carlos Eduardo Lesmes López (Tallinn University), “Documentary Film and the Narrativization of Memory”
Astrid Greve Kristensen (Sorbonne University), “Return and Returnees: Memory Quests”

Panel 4: Human Rights and Difficult Heritage
Discussant: Ene Kõresaar (University of Tartu)
Charley Boerman (Radboud University), “Human Rights as a Shared Past: Remembering the Holodomor Through Global Commemorative Practices”
Diãna Popova (Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga), “How to Interpret Difficult Heritage to Youth Audiences? Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research”
Hanna Aunin (Tallinn University), “Search for Recognition: Empathy Mode of Memory Transmission in In the Crosswind (2014)”

Panel 5: Visual Rhetoric and Transformation of Meaning
Discussant: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska (German Historical Institute, Warsaw)
Teisi Ligi (Tallinn University), “Performative Cinematic Acts of Form in Baltic New Wave
Documentaries”
Stanislav Menzelevskyi (Indiana University Bloomington), “Chornobyl [In]Visible: Transformation of Social Meaning and Visual Rhetoric”
Aynur Rahmatova (Tallinn University), “Living Ghosts and Children’s Stories: Reading Five Films on the Spanish Civil War”

Panel 6: Memories of Socialist Pasts
Discussant: Veronika Pehe (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Daria Gordeeva (LMU, Munich), “Socialist Past as a Battlefield: How to Analyse Historical Feature Films”
Filip Mitricevic (Indiana University, Bloomington), “We Were Celebrating Pig-Slaughter”: Oral History and the Alternative Spaces Within State Holidays in Socialist Yugoslavia”
Anna Greszta (University of Amsterdam), “Memory, History and Conspiracy in Russo-Ukrainian War”

Format
Invited experts will present keynote lectures on the latest developments in theory and practice in their respective fields, as well as providing students with a variety of case studies to consider. Field trips will provide real-world examples for students to analyze through the lens of what they learn throughout the week. Finally, students will be able to present their research to their peers and instructors, providing valuable presentation experience as well as the opportunity to gain detailed feedback from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. PhD work in progress will be presented in the form of panels of 3 students, who will each give a 15-minute talk that is based on their ongoing research, relevant to the theme of the summer school. Each panel will be chaired by a senior scholar who acts as respondent and kicks off the extensive Q&A. PhD participants are expected to pre-circulate their paper to the other members of their panel and to the organizers at least 3 weeks in advance of the school. They are expected to be in full attendance for the duration of the school.

Practical Information
Organizers
The summer school is part of the project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 853385). For more information see: https://translatingmemories.tlu.ee

Where?
The summer school takes place in Roosta, Estonia: https://www.roosta.ee
The participants are accommodated in shared cottages with limited single room/mezzanine options. The transportation from Tallinn, to and from the location, is organised by the summer school.

When?
Monday 11 July 2022, 9.00 a.m. – Friday 15 July 2022, 6.00 p.m.

Costs
The registration fee for the summer school is €100. A fee waiver may be requested in case of severe financial need. This fee covers a part of accommodation and transportation to Roosta. The rest will be covered by the organisers. Applicants are responsible for the costs of their transportation to and from Tallinn and accommodation in Tallinn (if needed).

Applications
Interested applicants should contact Anita Pluwak, (anitaw@tlu.ee) with a 300-word abstract for a 15-minute paper (including title, your name, and institutional affiliation), a description of your doctoral research project (one paragraph), and a short CV (max. 1 page), as a single Word or PDF document. We still have a couple of free places and we accept application until the places are filled, but not later than 1 April 2022.

The event comprises both a Seminar Series (12 April; 27 April; 4 May) and a Symposium (19-20 May).
Mode of Delivery: Online
Institution: University College Cork, Ireland

Seminars and Symposium are open to the public and are free of charge. However, it is compulsory to register in advance. Please find below the links to register for each of the seminars and the Symposium. Registrations for the Symposium close on 13 May 2022. Zoom links will be circulated to all registered attendees in advance of the events.

All events will be held on Zoom in the Irish Time Zone

Seminar Series
I) 12 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm 
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis) ¡Desobedientes!: Implicated Subjects, Memory, and Responsibility in Post-Dictatorship Chilean Documentaries
Registration: https://forms.gle/gGyBznfaS7qZwt1aA

II) 27 April 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm 
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) Implication in Commemoration: On Current Interests in Past Complicities
Registration: https://forms.gle/tAi2oyECvGMZ4ixVA 

III) 4 May 2022, 5.00 – 6.00 pm 
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow) Remembering Cold War Pasts Across a World of Cinemas
Registration: https://forms.gle/EcgSShUYU7YKDL6E8

Symposium(19 – 20 May 2022)
University College Cork
Registration:  https://forms.gle/upXgJrznTYNAyAxH9

Day 1 – Thursday 19 May 2022

9:00 – 9:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks 

9:30 – 11:00 Panel 1: Victims, Perpetrators, and Beyond
Bareez Majid (Heidelberg University) Literature and Escape: A Critical Reading of the novel City of White Musicians by the Kurdistani author Bachtyar Ali
Claudia Sandberg (University of Melbourne)The Story of a Tiger in the Bathroom: German-Jewish filmmaker Peter Lilienthal in West German Television of the 1960s 
Esteban Córdoba Arroyo (University of Kitakyushu) Heroism, Messianism and Pentateuchal Remorse: Overcoming the Scheme of Victims and Perpetrators in the Collective Memory of World War 2 in Japanese Cinema (1980-2020)

11:00 – 11:15 Break

11:15 – 13:00 Panel 2: Re-Imagining Dictators and Perpetrators in Cultural Production
Rachel MagShamhráin (University College Cork) Brother Hitler: The Continuing Allure of Hitler Films in Re/unified Germany
Pooja Sancheti (The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research [IISER] Pune) Curses and Conspiracies: Reading Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Patrick Vierthaler (Kyoto University) Founding Father or Traitor to the Nation? Contested Memories of Syngman Rhee in mid-1990s South Korea
Joanne Pettitt (University of Kent) The Nazi Paradigm: Holocaust Perpetrators in Representations of the British Far-Right

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch 

14:00 – 15:45 Panel 3: Narrative Perspectives on the Grey Zone
Ruth Murphy (University of Cambridge) Mixing metaphors: Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’ and Maria Lugones’ ‘mestizaje
Lena Seauve (Institute for Latin American Studies [LAI] of the Free University of Berlin) On the Figure of the Bystander in Martin Kohan’s Dos Veces Junio (2002)
Jessica Marino (Carleton University) Mauricio Rosencof’s The Letters that Never Came and Uruguay’s Latest Dictatorial Rule—Framing a Redemptive Narrative of the Past through the Lens of Jewish Heritage
Stefano Bellin (University of Warwick) Being Numerous: Negotiations of Memory and Responsibility in Andrés Trapiello’s Ayer no más

15:45 – 16:00 Break 

16:00 – 17:00 Panel 4: Generational Memories of Dictatorships
Mario Panico and Cristina Demaria (University of Bologna) A Perpetrator in the Family: Generational Memory and Accountability in Documentary Filmmaking
Jeanne Devautour Choi (Columbia University) The Hijos Delayed (Re-)Implication in Argentina’s Dictatorial Past
Cara Levey (University College Cork) Diasporizing Memory and Victimhoood: Challenging the ‘exilio dorado’ (Golden Exile) Myth in Tus padres volverán [Your Parents Will Come Back]and Hora Chilena [Chilean Time]
Violeta Ros (University of Zaragoza) The Portrait of Sad old Men. Domestic Ethnographies of Political Violence in Contemporary Spanish Fiction

17:45 – 18:00 Break 

18:00 – 19:00 Keynote Lecture 1
Minna Johanna Niemi (The Arctic University of Norway) Western Readers and African Narratives: Towards Responsible Reading Strategies

Day 2 – Friday 20 May 

9:00 – 10:00 Keynote Lecture 2
Jie-Hyun Lim (Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul) Mass Dictatorship: Vernacular Memories of Implicated Subjects and the Dictatorship from Below

10:00 – 10:30 Break

10:30 – 12:00 Panel 5: Vectors of Memory of Past Histories of Violence 
Vanessa Tautter (University of Brighton) Negotiating the Nazi Past from an Implicated Position: Emotional Dynamics in Transgenerational Memory Processes in Austria
Arif Subekti, Hervina Nurullita, and Grace Leksana (Malang State University, East Java) Singing the Memories: Local Songs and Indonesia’s Collective Memory of Anti Lefitst Violence
Ethan Xi Hao Eu (National Taiwan University) The Weight of Our Sky: The May 13 Incident in a Young Adult Novel and a Webcomics Series

12:00 – 12:15 Break 

12:15 – 13:45 Panel 6: Curating Implication in the Musealisation of Dictatorships 
Rose Smith (Charles University – University of Groningen)Marcos Dictatorship (Re)Imagined in Museum Design 
Kirsti Jõesalu and Ene Kõresaar (Tartu University) Diversification and Alternative Subjectivities in Estonian Museums: Memory of Soviet Complicity Revisited
Margaret Anderson Comer (Tallinn University)Portrayals of Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression and Violence in Moscow, Russia

13:45 – 14:45 Lunch 

14:45 – 16:15 Panel 7: Filling the Gaps in Visual Representations of Dictatorships
Lucas Martins Néia (University of São Paulo) The Military Dictatorship in Brazilian TV Fiction: Approaches and Gaps
Pablo Turnes (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation – Free University of Berlin) To Dare Damnation. The problem of Vengeance and its Representation in Comics in Post-Dictatorial Argentina
Eva-Rosa Ferrand Verdejo (CY Cergy Paris University – University of Warwick) The Novísimo Cine Chileno and the Aesthetics of Trauma

16:15 – 16:30 Break

16:30 – 18:00 Panel 8: Looking at the Past, Fighting for the Future
Emanuela Buscemi (University of Monterrey) Memory Activism and Performance in the contemporary Mexican feminist movement
Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida (The Cooper Union) Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today
Peter B. Kaufman (MIT Open Learning) The Sociology of Knowledge: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

18:00 – 18:15 Break 

18:15 – 19:30 Roundtable Discussion
Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis)
Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow)

This Symposium is generously supported by the Irish Research Council, The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures of University College Cork (CASiLaC), and the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Simon Weppel, University of Cambridge, UK
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
10 May 2022 16.00 (EET)

Simon Weppel
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
In this paper, I will demonstrate what I argue is the development of a ‘heritage temporality’ in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. On the basis of a discourse analysis of visitor guidebooks, tourist brochures, and newspaper articles relating to three Lenin museums, I trace a shift in how past, present, and future are discussed in late Soviet society.
Until the mid-1960s, these highly ideologically charged sites emphasise their educational and agitational purpose, describing themselves as ‘sources of inspiration’ for the builders of communism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, a gradual change takes place: guidebooks invoke the future ever more rarely, instead inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the historic surroundings of days gone by. Increasingly, the museums favour the restoration and preservation of an idealised past over the continuation of their erstwhile future-oriented discourses.
My paper will theorise this phenomenon and place it into the wider cultural and historical context of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s dichotomy of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ in order to investigate the preconditions for the rise of heritage as a cultural phenomenon – both in the Soviet Union and globally.

Simon Weppel is a PhD Candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge. He holds a BA from the Free University Berlin, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and has spent time at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and SciencesPo, Paris. His doctoral project studies the development of heritage preservation in the later Soviet Union.

Please register here

22 February 2022 16.00 (EET)
Mitja Velikonja, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s

5 April 2022 16.00 (EET)
Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University, Sweden
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence”

10 May 2022 16.00 (EET)
Simon Weppel, University of Cambridge, UK
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union

Mitja Velikonja
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s
How are we to understand the Yugoslav 1980s today, how are we to write about them, paint them, record or put them into poetry, music or the stage, to sing about them; how are we to value them after the bloody tale of the 1990s? Can we still write poetry on the last Yugoslav decade after what happened in Srebrenica, Vukovar, Ahmići, Sarajevo, and the hundreds other killing fields, or is this too barbaric as well? My presentation analyses the various types of cultural and artistic reflection – i.e. the construction and the perception – upon the 1980s in socialist Yugoslavia as they have developed from its ashes since 1991. As a cultural scientist of post-Yugoslavia – and not as a historian of Yugoslavia –  I will not speak about the historical 1980s but about their contemporary cultural representations; about the artistic construction and deconstruction of that decade; about the way images of the recent past are formed in today’s art and culture. My ambition is not doing historiographical trips from the post-Yugoslav present to the Yugoslav 1980s, but posing culturological questions about how the Yugoslav 1980s are present on the today’s artistic and wider cultural map.
Mitja Velikonja is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main areas of his research include contemporary Central-European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti culture, collective memory and post-socialist nostalgia. His last monographs are The Chosen Few – Aesthetics and Ideology in Football-Fan Graffiti and Street Art (Doppelhouse Press, 2021), Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe (Routledge, 2020, awarded as one of the best achievements of University of Ljubljana in the year 2020, already translated into Serbian and in translation in Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian), Rock’n’Retro – New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Slovenian Music (Sophia, 2013), Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2008), Eurosis – A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2005) and Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (TAMU Press, 2003). He is co-author of the book Celestial Yugoslavia: Interaction of Political Mythologies and Popular Culture (2012), and co-editor and co-author of books Post-Yugoslavia – New Cultural and Political Perspectives (2014) and Yugoslavia From A Historical Perspective (2017). For his achievements he received four national and one international award (Erasmus EuroMedia Award by European Society for Education and Communication, 2008). He was a full-time visiting professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2002 and 2003), at Columbia University in New York (2009 and 2014), at University of Rijeka (2015), at New York Institute in St. Petersburg (2015 and 2016), at Yale University (2020), Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia (2004/2005), and visiting researcher at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2012) and at the Remarque Institute of the New York University (2018).

Madina Tlostanova
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence”
Сoloniality of memory is one of the effective and inherently violent instruments of modernity as a repressive onto-epistemic system that effectively controls people through imposing specifically constructed and legitimized collective memory models and historical narratives and excluding or disqualifying all other forms and ways to remember. Ultimately this process may lead to extreme forms of zombification and biopolitical control disciplining and supressing the most personal, affective, and corporeal forms of memory. Societies that went through multiple and entangled experiences of politically, existentially, aesthetically, and epistemically repressive regimes such as apartheid, dictatorship, totalitarianism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and other forms of modern/colonial unfreedom, tend to come up with complex and often conflicting responses to the wiped out or severely edited memory syndrome in their post-dependence phases where they are faced with a necessity to reimagine and remake their worlds anew through processes of “re-existence”. The post-Soviet/postcolonial struggles with (de)coloniality of memory are an interesting example of such positionality. In my talk I will focus on several fictional and artistic instances of (de)coloniality of memory coming from the post-Soviet space.
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). Her research interests focus on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, feminisms of the Global South, postsocialist human condition, fiction and art, critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Centre of Contemporary Culture Tselinny, Kazakhstan, 2020) and the co-edited volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (co-edited with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Routledge, 2021). Currently she is working on an experimental mixed media book “Fictions of Unsettlement”.

Simon Weppel
“Stepping Over the Threshold of Time”: The Rise of Heritage in the Brezhnev-Era Soviet Union
In this paper, I will demonstrate what I argue is the development of a ‘heritage temporality’ in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. On the basis of a discourse analysis of visitor guidebooks, tourist brochures, and newspaper articles relating to three Lenin museums, I trace a shift in how past, present, and future are discussed in late Soviet society.
Until the mid-1960s, these highly ideologically charged sites emphasise their educational and agitational purpose, describing themselves as ‘sources of inspiration’ for the builders of communism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, a gradual change takes place: guidebooks invoke the future ever more rarely, instead inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the historic surroundings of days gone by. Increasingly, the museums favour the restoration and preservation of an idealised past over the continuation of their erstwhile future-oriented discourses.
My paper will theorise this phenomenon and place it into the wider cultural and historical context of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s dichotomy of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ in order to investigate the preconditions for the rise of heritage as a cultural phenomenon – both in the Soviet Union and globally.
Simon Weppel is a PhD Candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge. He holds a BA from the Free University Berlin, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and has spent time at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and SciencesPo, Paris. His doctoral project studies the development of heritage preservation in the later Soviet Union.

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Programme
Wednesday, 27 April
14.00-14.15 Opening
14.15-16.15 Panel 1: Memory, Migration, Materiality
Chair: Eneken Laanes
Asmaa Hassaneen: From Royal Copenhagen to Kitsch Coffee Cups Wealth and Poverty in the Travelling Memories of Palestinian Immigrants in Selected Texts and Interviews
John Greaney: Samuel Beckett, Mnemonic Migration, and the Location of Cultural Memory
Thomas van de Putte: From Travelling to Travelled Memory
Hanna Meretoja: Past Worlds as Spaces of Possibility: Agency and its Limits in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (Visitation)
16.15-16.45 Break
16.45-18.15 Panel 2: Reader Positions and Mnemonic Migration
Chair: Barbara Tönquist-Plewa
Hannah Teichler: Remembering Forced Labour Migration: Recombinant Selves in Anglophone Literature
Jessica Ortner: The Puzzled Reader: Gabs of Indeterminacy in Bosnian War memory
Kaisa Kaakinen: Mediation of Local Memories to Heterogeneous Readerships – The Case of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project
Pérez Baquero: Remembering Conflict and Exile Beyond the National Frame: Max Aub’s Depiction of the Spanish Civil War From a Transnational Gaze

Thursday, 28 April
9.30-11.30 Panel 3: Representation and Circulation of Bosnian War Memories
Chair: Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
Aigi Heero: Remembering Višegrad: Memories of Childhood and War in Saša Stanišić’s Novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Dina Abazovic: Where You Come From Under Pressure: Two Novels About the Bosnian War
Fedja Wierød Borčak ”The Value of Returning Memories: How Memory Accounts by Bosnian-Herzegovinian Émigré Writers are Received in Bosna and Herzegovina”
Tea Sindbæk Andersen: Transmitting Bosnian war memories into the Danish and British public: circulation and reception of literature of the Bosnian war
11.30-12.00 Break
12.00-13.00 Keynote: Astrid Erll: Deep Histories of Mnemonic Migration: An Odyssey
13.00-14.00 Panel 4: Multidirectional Memory, Connection, Remediation
Chair: Jessica Ortner
Colin Davis: The Circulation of Memory From Buchenwald to Stalinism and the Bosnian Genocide: Semprun, Goethe and Carola Neher
Unni Langås: Two Stops on the Itinerary of Anne Frank’s Diary
Biljana Markovic: Odyssean Memory and the Refugee Crises, Tracing Transcultural and Transtemporal Mnemonic Relationality in Poetry
Silvia Riva: Camp Antechambers and Dress Rehearsals: Memories of “Minor” Genocides of the Twentieth Century in Contemporary French-Language Fiction
16.00-16.30 Break
16.30-18.30 Panel 5: Post-Socialist Memory in New Contexts
Chair: Tine Rosen
Eneken Laanes: Katja Petrowskaja’s Translational Poetics of Memory
Anja Tippner “People Would Close Their Eyes to Think Back to a Past and Tell Untruths About It Until They Were True”: Literature After Memory Studies and Migratory Aesthetics
Anita Pluwak: Red Princess, Black Widow and Other Stories: Popular Reception of Political (Auto)biographies from Postsocialist Poland
Jan Schwarz The Historical Novel as World Literature of Memory in Contemporary Europe: Olga Tokarczuk’s Kiegi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob, 2014)

Friday, 29 April
9.30-11.30 Panel 6: Translation and Circulation
Chair: Fedja Wierød Borčak
Mónika Dánél: Shared Memories – Remediation as Accented Reading
Una Tanović: On Prosthetic Memories and Phantom Limbs: Self-Translation and Pseudotranslation in Bekim Sejranović’s Tvoj sin Huckleberry Finn/Din sønn, Huckleberry Finn (2015) and Alen Mešković’s Ukulele jam (2011)
Stijn Vervaet: Translating Memories of the Bosnian War: Translingual Writers as Memory Brokers
Jakob Lothe:Variants of Memory and Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
11.30-12.00 Break
12.00-13.00 Keynote: Rebecca Walkowitz: Additional Languages: The Translated Fiction of Lahiri and Luiselli
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-16.00 Panel 7 Iceland-Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery
Chair: Tea Sindbæk Andersen
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir: Iceland – Ireland: Transnational Memories of Crises in Álfrún Gunnlaugsdóttir’s Siglingin um síkin and Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth
Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir: The Past That Never Was: Sjón and Jamie O’Neill’s Queer Historical Fiction
Fionnuala Dillane: Crimes on the Atlantic Periphery: Irish and Icelandic Writings From the Edge
16.00-17.00 Closing Round Table

Keynotes:
Astrid Erll (Goethe University Frankfurt / The Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform)
Deep Histories of Mnemonic Migration: An Odyssey
The migration of people and of mnemonic mediations is not just a phenomenon of our present age, but it has its own deep (and largely unexplored) histories. My lecture addresses this longue durée of mnemonic migration, using as an example the Homeric odyssey – both an origin narrative and perpetual medium of travelling memory.
Old narratives such as the odyssey pose a variety of challenges to memory studies: How can we find ways to trace their narrative agency and afterlives across thousands of years, multiple languages and cultures, minds and media?
As we are now living in an age of conspiracy myths, rampant populism, and Putin’s war, I chose to focus not so much on the rich repertoire of cosmopolitan memories that were enabled by and articulated with the odyssey (from James Joyce’s Ulysses to current discourses about refugees). Instead, I will discuss the logic of propaganda, fake news, biased and damaging usages of ‘odyssean memory’. My examples range all the way from medieval slander to Holocaust denial, ‘memory abuse in translation’, and present-day identitarianism. At the heart of my lecture is therefore the pressing question: What makes some kinds of mnemonic migration ‘constructive’ and ‘productive’ and others ‘false’ and ‘abusive’? And how can we describe the formative role of longue durée memory in such processes?
Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She has worked on German, British, South Asian, American, and South African literatures and media cultures. Her research interests include literary history (focus on 19th-21st centuries), media history (focus on film and photography), English and comparative literature, cultural theory, media theory, narratology, transcultural studies and – last not least – memory studies.
Astrid Erll is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (with A. Nünning, De Gruyter, since 2004) and co-editor of A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (with A. Nünning, 2010) and Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (with A. Rigney, 2009). More recently, she published with Ann Rigney Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe(Image & Narrative, 2017) and Cultural Memory after the Transnational Turn (Memory Studies, 2018). She is author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave 2011), an introduction to memory studies which was originally published in German as Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2005, 3rd ed. 2017) and has also been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Polish.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers University)
Additional Languages: The Translated Fiction of Lahiri and Luiselli
Contemporary migrant writers know that there is no civic hospitality without multilingualism. However, writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Valeria Luiselli are approaching this axiom in unprecedented ways. Instead of expanding original languages, they are creating intralingual and multilingual works that operate in secondary, translated, or additional tongues. They approach the the histories of undocumented children at the U.S. border or immigrant service workers by refusing to establish a single, collective language for their characters, their settings, or their writing. This lecture dilates out from these examples to argue that we need to shift from a paradigm of “foreign languages” to a paradigm of “additional languages.” We need a more robust engagement with the languages that operate both across and within literary histories.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Dean of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University.  She the author or editor of 10 books and has delivered more than 80 distinguished lectures in the fields of modernism, contemporary fiction, and world literature in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America.  Her book Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) received Honorable Mention for the first annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the MLA and has recently been published in Japanese in a born-translated edition that includes a new essay and an interview with the translators.  Her current book project, “Future Reading,” focuses a new generation of migrant novelists, essayists, and nonfiction fabulists who are changing how we encounter world languages and how we use languages to create inclusive communities.  An essay taken from the first chapter, “On Not Knowing,” appeared in New Literary History in 2020.A second essay from that project, “Less Than One Language,” appeared in SubStance in 2021, in a special issue on “The Postlingual Turn,” which she co-edited with yasser elhariry.

Organiser:
Mnemonic Migration: Transnational Circulation and Reception of Wartime Memories in post-Yugoslav Migrant Literature (Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2019–2022, Jessica Ortner, Tea Sindbæk Andersen)
Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena (ERC, Grant Number 853385, 2020–2024, project leader Eneken Laanes)

Call for Papers (closed)
This conference aims to explore how memories travel through the aesthetic medium of literature and are translated into new local communities of remembering. The conference concentrates on the travel of memories (Erll 2011) within or into the cultural, geographical and symbolic boundaries of Europe, perhaps fostering new knowledge and attention to events that are otherwise marginalized in a Westernized perspective on the European past and identity.According to Ann Rigney and Astrid Erll (2009), fictional literature is a significant medium of cultural memory that has the ability of “sparking public debates on historical topics that had hitherto been marginalized or forgotten.” This conference looks at transcultural memory formations that are generated: 1) by the mobility of people across or into Europe and 2) by the production of “transcultural memorial forms” (Laanes 2021) that translate experiences to other geographic arenas.
According to Erll (2011), migrants can be seen as carriers of memory, understood as “individuals who share in collective images and narratives of the past.” By expressing their mnemonic displacement – that is, their disorientation in the mnemonic framework of their host country together with their contrasting memories – migrant literature contributes to setting the agenda for future collective remembrance. This conference shall explore how this activity, which we would like to think of as mnemonic migration, speaks to the (re)construction of shared memories in Europe and/or its countries and regions. Furthermore, we are interested in questioning which “transcultural memorial forms” may be used to “culturally translate experiences in order to make them known and intelligible to others,” thus making memories travel (Laanes 2021).
Crucially, the successful travel of memories depends on reception by members of a mnemonic community. Therefore, this conference is also concerned with the reception and recirculation of transcultural memories, asking if novels, due to the “transformative power of the arts and their capacity to mobilize individuals through imagination and affect” (Rigney 2014), may forge what Alison Landsberg (2004) has called prosthetic memory: that is, a deep-felt and empathetic connection to events one has not lived through. We are keen to explore how mediations of memory circulate, how they are received, and if and how they may develop into what we could think of as prosthetic memories in various European contexts, perhaps contributing to new memory canons within Europe.
We welcome papers that consider, but are not limited to, any of the following issues:
• Memory literature by authors who have migrated to or within Europe
• Reception and prosthetic memory
• World literature of memory in a European perspective
• Travelling memory
• Methodological considerations of studying transcultural memory in literature
• Methodological considerations of studying circulation, reception and prosthetic memory

Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University, Sweden
(De)coloniality of Memory: Intersections of Colonial and Totalitarian Trajectories and Creative Memory Work As a Way To “Re-existence”

5 April 2022 16.00 (Tallinn time)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please join us on Zoom here

Сoloniality of memory is one of the effective and inherently violent instruments of modernity as a repressive onto-epistemic system that effectively controls people through imposing specifically constructed and legitimized collective memory models and historical narratives and excluding or disqualifying all other forms and ways to remember. Ultimately this process may lead to extreme forms of zombification and biopolitical control disciplining and supressing the most personal, affective, and corporeal forms of memory. Societies that went through multiple and entangled experiences of politically, existentially, aesthetically, and epistemically repressive regimes such as apartheid, dictatorship, totalitarianism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and other forms of modern/colonial unfreedom, tend to come up with complex and often conflicting responses to the wiped out or severely edited memory syndrome in their post-dependence phases where they are faced with a necessity to reimagine and remake their worlds anew through processes of “re-existence”. The post-Soviet/postcolonial struggles with (de)coloniality of memory are an interesting example of such positionality. In my talk I will focus on several fictional and artistic instances of (de)coloniality of memory coming from the post-Soviet space.

Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). Her research interests focus on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, feminisms of the Global South, postsocialist human condition, fiction and art, critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Centre of Contemporary Culture Tselinny, Kazakhstan, 2020) and the co-edited volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (co-edited with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Routledge, 2021). Currently she is working on an experimental mixed media book “Fictions of Unsettlement”

Mitja Velikonja, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Poetry after Srebrenica? – A Cultural Reflection on the Yugoslav 1980s

22 February 2022 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please join us on Zoom here

How are we to understand the Yugoslav 1980s today, how are we to write about them, paint them, record or put them into poetry, music or the stage, to sing about them; how are we to value them after the bloody tale of the 1990s? Can we still write poetry on the last Yugoslav decade after what happened in Srebrenica, Vukovar, Ahmići, Sarajevo, and the hundreds other killing fields, or is this too barbaric as well? My presentation analyses the various types of cultural and artistic reflection – i.e. the construction and the perception – upon the 1980s in socialist Yugoslavia as they have developed from its ashes since 1991. As a cultural scientist of post-Yugoslavia – and not as a historian of Yugoslavia –  I will not speak about the historical 1980s but about their contemporary cultural representations; about the artistic construction and deconstruction of that decade; about the way images of the recent past are formed in today’s art and culture. My ambition is not doing historiographical trips from the post-Yugoslav present to the Yugoslav 1980s, but posing culturological questions about how the Yugoslav 1980s are present on the today’s artistic and wider cultural map.
Mitja Velikonja is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main areas of his research include contemporary Central-European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti culture, collective memory and post-socialist nostalgia. His last monographs are The Chosen Few – Aesthetics and Ideology in Football-Fan Graffiti and Street Art (Doppelhouse Press, 2021), Post-Socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe (Routledge, 2020, awarded as one of the best achievements of University of Ljubljana in the year 2020, already translated into Serbian and in translation in Slovenian, Macedonian and Albanian), Rock’n’Retro – New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Slovenian Music (Sophia, 2013), Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2008), Eurosis – A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Peace Institute, Ljubljana, 2005) and Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (TAMU Press, 2003). He is co-author of the book Celestial Yugoslavia: Interaction of Political Mythologies and Popular Culture (2012), and co-editor and co-author of books Post-Yugoslavia – New Cultural and Political Perspectives (2014) and Yugoslavia From A Historical Perspective (2017). For his achievements he received four national and one international award (Erasmus EuroMedia Award by European Society for Education and Communication, 2008). He was a full-time visiting professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2002 and 2003), at Columbia University in New York (2009 and 2014), at University of Rijeka (2015), at New York Institute in St. Petersburg (2015 and 2016), at Yale University (2020), Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia (2004/2005), and visiting researcher at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2012) and at the Remarque Institute of the New York University (2018).

Mischa Gabowitsch, Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities

30 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please register here

The rise of expressions of regret and atonement for past atrocities has been described as the triumph of an international norm, and recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in the different actors and processes—sub-, trans-, or supra-national—that contribute to the diffusion of that norm. Yet in most cases, the idea is articulated not simply as the application of a universal norm to a particular national or local context, but by analogy. Other countries are held up as examples, as models to emulate or as unreachable gold standards of atonement. Germany in particular is often referred to as a master atoner, a country with an exemplary track record of “coming to terms with its past” that holds valuable lessons for other nations.
Based on a major volume I edited, in this talk I will explore the effects and implications of atoning by analogy. I distinguish between four different ideal-typical uses of foreign models in debates about atonement: as a springboard, a yardstick, a foil, or a screen, and illustrate them with examples from around the world before focusing more specifically on the role that references to the “German model” have played in a Soviet and post-Soviet Russian context.

Mischa Gabowitsch is a historian and sociologist based at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from Oxford and a PhD from the School of Advanced Social Studies (EHESS) in Paris, and is an alumnus fellow of the Princeton University Society of Fellows and past editor-in-chief of the Russian journals NZ and Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. His book publications in English are Protest in Putin’s Russia and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities. He has also edited several books in Russian and German on war memory and commemoration in Russia and beyond. At present he is working on a history of Soviet war memorials as well as a book on Victory Day celebrations since 1945, and also has various projects related to pragmatic sociology and specifically the sociology of regimes of engagement

19 October 2021 16.00 (EEST)
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape

9 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition

30 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Mischa Gabowitsch, Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities

Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape
In this talk, I will present an article that has recently been accepted for publication in the History & Memory journal. The article examines the palimpsestic memoryscape of Białystok, the largest city in northeast Poland, to illuminate the ongoing struggle in contemporary Poland between two memory regimes: the declarative “multiculturalism” and the submerged racism. It employs the concept of “heterotopia” as a theoretical device and walking as a method to study the Jewish Heritage Trail (JHT) as an attempt to recover the memory of bygone multiethnicity and, in doing so, to mint a new “multicultural” brand for the city. By analyzing the post-Jewish spaces located on the JHT—all of which have been appropriated, erased, and/or marginalized—the article shows that this new “multicultural” memory regime is shot through with racism, because it reproduces the inequalities and segregation that structured inter-ethnic relationships in the past.
Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius is Postdoctoral Researcher (Core Fellow) in media and communication at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Having previously done research on ethical trade communication, she is currently working on a project concerning mediated racism and nationalism in Poland. Her articles have been published in journals across disciplines such as Nations and Nationalism, Globalizations, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, and Media and Communication.

Maria Kobielska
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition
In the talk, I explore the potential of the Polish past being exhibited in the global context, drawing on my research on the Polish museum boom in the 21st century. In recent years, historical museums have gained particular attention in Poland; multiple newly founded or rearranged institutions, offering spectacular exhibitions, powerfully influence visions of the past. “New museums” occupy prominent position within contemporary Polish memory culture and thus can serve as touchstones of its dynamics. As visual, performative and emotional memory media, museum exhibitions promise to transcend the boundaries of a single national perspective and language in order to make regional past intelligible in the global context. Museum creators frequently express their aspirations to do so. For instance, Paweł Machcewicz, the first director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, elaborates on the figure of a “tourist from Portugal” as an imaginary visitor of the exhibition, used in the course of his team’s work to communicate regional and Polish memory of the war in an internationally comprehensible way (Machcewicz 2017). Leading museums of the 21st century often aim at both domestic and international audiences and consequently struggle to simultaneously perform divergent, if not conflicting, tasks. This has so often been a bone of contention: how should museums prioritise? On the one hand, there is a risk of self-colonisation, when local memory is reduced to an internationally recognisable form. On the other, when celebrating local memory is valued over contextualising and communicating, it is probable that ressentiment rather than empowerment will follow. In the course of the talk I will analyse diverse museum strategies designed to neutralise both risks, taking into account prevalent historical policies and codes of memory culture. I will focus on Polish museums that are most popular among the international audience, like the Warsaw Rising Museum and the Museum of the Second World War, but also explore lesser-known cases that can inspire “curatorial dreaming” (Butler&Lehrer 2016) about new forms of citizenship and community.
Maria Kobielska, PhD, is a memory scholar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures (JU), of the Memory Studies Association, and of the Polish Association of Cultural Studies. She has written on contemporary Polish literature and culture in the context of memory and politics. Her most recent book discusses Polish memory culture in the 21st century (Polska kultura pamięci: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny, 2016) and she is currently working on a research project that focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums.

Mischa Gabowitsch
Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities
The rise of expressions of regret and atonement for past atrocities has been described as the triumph of an international norm, and recent years have seen increased scholarly interest in the different actors and processes—sub-, trans-, or supra-national—that contribute to the diffusion of that norm. Yet in most cases, the idea is articulated not simply as the application of a universal norm to a particular national or local context, but by analogy. Other countries are held up as examples, as models to emulate or as unreachable gold standards of atonement. Germany in particular is often referred to as a master atoner, a country with an exemplary track record of “coming to terms with its past” that holds valuable lessons for other nations.
Based on a major volume I edited, in this talk I will explore the effects and implications of atoning by analogy. I distinguish between four different ideal-typical uses of foreign models in debates about atonement: as a springboard, a yardstick, a foil, or a screen, and illustrate them with examples from around the world before focusing more specifically on the role that references to the “German model” have played in a Soviet and post-Soviet Russian context.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a historian and sociologist based at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from Oxford and a PhD from the School of Advanced Social Studies (EHESS) in Paris, and is an alumnus fellow of the Princeton University Society of Fellows and past editor-in-chief of the Russian journals NZ and Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. His book publications in English are Protest in Putin’s Russia and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities. He has also edited several books in Russian and German on war memory and commemoration in Russia and beyond. At present he is working on a history of Soviet war memorials as well as a book on Victory Day celebrations since 1945, and also has various projects related to pragmatic sociology and specifically the sociology of regimes of engagement.

Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland
Poland Exhibited: Polish Museum Boom and the Problem of International Recognition

9 November 2021 16.00 (EET)
Tallinn University, Estonia (online)
Please register here

In the talk, I explore the potential of the Polish past being exhibited in the global context, drawing on my research on the Polish museum boom in the 21st century. In recent years, historical museums have gained particular attention in Poland; multiple newly founded or rearranged institutions, offering spectacular exhibitions, powerfully influence visions of the past. “New museums” occupy prominent position within contemporary Polish memory culture and thus can serve as touchstones of its dynamics. As visual, performative and emotional memory media, museum exhibitions promise to transcend the boundaries of a single national perspective and language in order to make regional past intelligible in the global context. Museum creators frequently express their aspirations to do so. For instance, Paweł Machcewicz, the first director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, elaborates on the figure of a “tourist from Portugal” as an imaginary visitor of the exhibition, used in the course of his team’s work to communicate regional and Polish memory of the war in an internationally comprehensible way (Machcewicz 2017). Leading museums of the 21st century often aim at both domestic and international audiences and consequently struggle to simultaneously perform divergent, if not conflicting, tasks. This has so often been a bone of contention: how should museums prioritise? On the one hand, there is a risk of self-colonisation, when local memory is reduced to an internationally recognisable form. On the other, when celebrating local memory is valued over contextualising and communicating, it is probable that ressentiment rather than empowerment will follow. In the course of the talk I will analyse diverse museum strategies designed to neutralise both risks, taking into account prevalent historical policies and codes of memory culture. I will focus on Polish museums that are most popular among the international audience, like the Warsaw Rising Museum and the Museum of the Second World War, but also explore lesser-known cases that can inspire “curatorial dreaming” (Butler&Lehrer 2016) about new forms of citizenship and community.

Maria Kobielska, PhD, is a memory scholar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures (JU), of the Memory Studies Association, and of the Polish Association of Cultural Studies. She has written on contemporary Polish literature and culture in the context of memory and politics. Her most recent book discusses Polish memory culture in the 21st century (Polska kultura pamięci: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny, 2016) and she is currently working on a research project that focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums.

Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Palimpsestic Memoryscape: Heterotopias, “Multiculturalism”, and Racism in the Polish Cityscape

19 October 2021 16.00 (EEST)
Tallinn University (online)
Please register here

In this talk, I will present an article that has recently been accepted for publication in the History & Memory journal. The article examines the palimpsestic memoryscape of Białystok, the largest city in northeast Poland, to illuminate the ongoing struggle in contemporary Poland between two memory regimes: the declarative “multiculturalism” and the submerged racism. It employs the concept of “heterotopia” as a theoretical device and walking as a method to study the Jewish Heritage Trail (JHT) as an attempt to recover the memory of bygone multiethnicity and, in doing so, to mint a new “multicultural” brand for the city. By analyzing the post-Jewish spaces located on the JHT—all of which have been appropriated, erased, and/or marginalized—the article shows that this new “multicultural” memory regime is shot through with racism, because it reproduces the inequalities and segregation that structured inter-ethnic relationships in the past.

Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius is Postdoctoral Researcher (Core Fellow) in media and communication at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Having previously done research on ethical trade communication, she is currently working on a project concerning mediated racism and nationalism in Poland. Her articles have been published in journals across disciplines such as Nations and Nationalism, Globalizations, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, and Media and Communication.

Thursday, 3 June (open to public)

16.00 – Online keynote address

“Perpetrators and Collaborators in Post-Socialist Memorial Museums in the Era of Victimhood” (Ljiljana Radonić, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna)

Please register here

17.30 – Virtual cocktail hour

Friday, 4 June (open only to the presenting participants)

10.00 – Introduction (Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University)

10.30 – Session 1: Available Subject Positions in Museums and Memorials

“Diversification and Alternative Subject Positions: On Museological Representation of Communism in Estonia” (Ene Kõresaar and Kirsti Jõesalu, University of Tartu)

“Portraying Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression in Moscow” (Margaret Comer, Tallinn University)

11:30 – Coffee Break

11:45 – Session 2: Rethinking the Implicated Subject

“Man-Made Famine Without Perpetrators? To the Question of the Rank-and-File Perpetrators in the Holodomor Studies” (Daria Mattingly, University of Cambridge)

“Perpetrator and/or Victim – Family History and the Totalitarian Condition in Stepanova and Lebedev” (Anja Tippner, University of Hamburg)

12.45 – Lunch

14.00 – Session 3: The Implicated Subject in Film

“Spectacular Provocation: Implicated Spectators in I Do Not Care if We go Down in History as Barbarians”(Diana Popa, Tallinn University)

“The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Perpetrator Memory in two Lithuanian Films: Purple Mist (2019) and Izaokas (2019)” (Violeta Davoliute, Vilnius University)

15:00 – Coffee Break

15:15 – Session 4: General Discussion and Workshopping 

16:00 – End of the Workshop

Many scholars in memory studies have drawn attention to the inadequacy of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy for understanding political violence in various historical situation and even more so in remembering the violence by subsequent generations. Eastern Europe is a case in point here. Soviet repressions in Russia often turned perpetrators of the first wave of repressions into the victims of the next (Etkind 2013). During WWII in East Central Europe, Ukraine and the Baltic states the victims of one occupying regime sometimes became the perpetrators of the next. During the socialist regime in Eastern Europe most of people did not occupy neither of these two positions, but still suffered and/or were complicit with autoritarian regimes. How to describe the convergence of these subject positions in relations to violence?
And what are the forms of implication (Rothberg 2019) of contemporary generations of Eastern Europeans in this past? More often than not we see the national states in the region externalise violence and identify with victims of past violence without bringing up the question of responsibility for collaboration and complicity. How to describe the implicated subjects in Eastern Europe and what are the ways in which they are implicated in the past of the region?
The workshop seeks answers to these questions by exploring commemorative practices and aesthetic media of memory that enable to forge subject positions that are resisted and made difficult to imagine or to adopt by the politics of memory in different contexts in Eastern Europe.

9.00 Welcome (Johanna Lindbladh, Lund University and Anja Tippner, University of Hamburg
9.15 Keynote
Reflections on the Institutions and Sociology of Contemporary Russian Documentary Film (Jeremy Hicks, University of London, Queen Mary)
10.00 Break
10.10 Parallel breakout sessions: Discussions of 4-5 chapter proposals in 3 groups
12.15 Lunch
12.45 Keynote
The Documentary in Concentrationary Art (Elizabeth Saxton, University of London, Queen Mary)
13.30 Concluding Remarks

21st Century Historical Films and Small Nations’ Collective Memory: Examples from Hungary and Romania
Andrea Virginás (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)

Tuesday, 13 April 2021 17.00 (EEST)
Tallinn University
Please join us here

In the talk I will present the first results of an individual research that aims to describe, analyze and theorize the role of 21st century historical films in an Eastern European/Hungarian, Polish and Romanian context, films that have often been met with resounding success within their domestic markets. The interpretative framework derives from cultural trauma theory and memory studies combined with the analysis of fictional feature films, and Thomas Elsaesser’s argument according to which European cinema may be conceived of “as a dispositif that constitutes, through an appeal to memory and identification, a special form of address, at once highly individual and capable of fostering a sense of belonging” (Elsaesser 2005, 21). A short introduction will sketch the phenomenon within the context of the only major national cinema in the former Eastern Bloc, the Polish one, with reference to the 2007 Katyn or the 2015 Ida, suggesting that the robustness of the industry and the size of the domestic market have been important factors in succeeding to activate “3rd generation” memory work (Assmann 2012) referring chiefly to the Second World War. Then, based on the model of Aleida Assmann who connects three generations to communicative memory – the victims who lived through collective traumas, the next generation of those who forgot, and the third generation who “meant to give a voice to historical memory” (Assmann 2012, 13) – I will continue with the analysis of two small national cinemas and their pertinent examples from the 21st century, trying to understand those features that lead to the popularity of such titles as Son of Saul (L. Nemes, 2015), Aferim! (R. Jude, 2015), Bet On Revenge (G. Herendi, 2017), Morometii 2 (S. Gulea, 2018), and Eternal Winter (A Szasz, 2018). I will examine the distribution routes and awards of the films, as possibly intertwined with the high domestic audience numbers, and will pay attention to the films’ Facebook pages and the fan-based conversations developed on social media – also influenced by film critical pieces. In the stylistic and narrative analysis of the films I rely on well known concepts that connect fictional historical films and communicative memory-work: Janet Walker’s “trauma cinema,” Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory, Susannah Radstone’s “cinema/memory,” Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory (2008), or Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka’s “Erinnerungsfilm/memory film”. However, as suggested by the high audience numbers, the cryptic, innovative and creative ways of conveying collective traumatization through audiovisual storytelling have been complemented with further elements beloved by Hungarian and Romanian domestic audiences. In my conclusion I will suggest that the addition of humor, the mixing of genres and a prescience of the television aesthetics popularized by 2020s streaming platforms have been also influential in the domestic success of the mentioned films. I will end by reflecting on the issue of whether these and more recent titles – I Don’t Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (R. Jude, 2018), Tall Tales (A. Szasz, 2019), Those Who Remained (B. Toth, 2019), Queen Marie of Romania (Alexis Cahill, 2019) or Malmkrog (C. Puiu, 2020) – may be considered as creating small national collectives of remembrance around the third generation “meant to give a voice to historical memory” (Assmann 2012, 13).
Andrea Virginás – MA in Gender Studies, PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies – is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Sapientia The Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj, Romania. Her research interests include film genres, European cinema, cultural theory, intermediality, narratology. She is the author of Post/Modern Crime: From Agatha Christie to Palahniuk, from Film Noir to Memento (VDM Verlag, 2011), the editor of The Use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), and has published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, European Journal of English Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of European Studies, Communicazioni Sociali and in the volumes Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories (I. B. Tauris, 2017), New Romanian Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions, and Genres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Postponed to 21-23 May 2021