8-9 May 2015, Dublin, Trinity College Dublin
The categories ‘memory’ and ‘identity’ have enjoyed significant scholarly attention in the past few decades. The upsurge of interest in memory and identity studies has affected a wide range of disciplines, including history, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and so on, and has inspired academic ventures of a truly interdisciplinary character. The ‘memory boom’ in the humanities triggered the bourgeoning of collaborative research projects, and resulted in numerous publications on the subject. Memories of traumatic events of the recent past—the Holocaust, World War II and Stalinist terror—and their impact on the transformation of individual as well as collective identities have been in the limelight of research, especially since the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Still, there are many possible ways for raising new questions, and there are several themes that could be explored further, including memories of normality and their impact on the shaping of identities; the influence of postcolonial criticism on memory/identity studies; the transnational circulation of narratives; or the ramifications of the transformation of memory studies.
