At a time when memory studies has become a fixture of the interdisciplinary research landscape, this two-day symposium engages critically with the development of the field, the current state of research and points to future directions in cultural memory studies. Prof. Astrid Erll’s (Frankfurt) keynote lecture “New Directions and Challenges in Cultural Memory Studies: Past, Present, Future” on Tuesday 14 June (from 18:00) will frame the key questions guiding this event. A roundtable discussion featuring leading scholars from Frankfurt and Giessen will complete the programme on Wednesday (from 17:00). The core of the two-day programme will see members, associates and partners of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the GCSC/GGK at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, present their current research and reflections on conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues in memory studies.

Showcasing PhD candidates’ and postdocs’ research, the five panels will discuss cultural memory in relation to postcolonial studies and reconciliation, institutions, literature, film, and digital media. Rather than offer narrow perspectives on particular topics or regions, the symposium highlights the entangled inter- and multidisciplinary concerns both in memory studies’ more established foci as well as in the field’s more recent developments. The participants’ talks show how both the colonial and socialist pasts continue to influence the present, while institutions continue to provide a conflicted and contested foundation of memory cultures. Mass media, such as literature, film and digital ones, are explored in their role as important mediators between diverse publics and audiences, on the one hand, and political and institutional actors on the other. The diversity of the papers provides a transnational and transcultural perspective enabling detailed investigation of how both historically and in the twenty-first century memory processes are negotiated in various cultural contexts.

The concluding roundtable discussion featuring Horst Carl (Giessen), Astrid Erll (Frankfurt), Andreas Langenohl (Giessen) and Ansgar Nünning (Giessen) will offer a forum for broader reflection on the themes of the symposium and the place of memory studies in the study of culture. The discussion will reflect on the legacies of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) Erinnerungskulturen, or Collaborative Research Centre on Cultures of Memory, founded in 1997 at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, which set out to intensify and broaden the study of memory, emphasizing above all “the plurality of cultural memory” (Erll 2011, 49). Like the entire two-day event, the roundtable will reflect on developments in the past twenty years, on the current state of memory studies and its possible futures in a changing academic, cultural and social landscape. In this respect, it is a particular highlight that the symposium invites some of the initiators of the SFB Erinnerungskulturen and new experts to continue the “thorough historicization of the category of memory” (Erstantrag, 11) and to reflect on the development of memory studies in past, present and future.