Contested Pasts

This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory.

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent.

Katharine Hodgkin lectures in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies, University of East London. Her research centres on questions of autobiography, memory and madness, particularly in the early modern period. She has published several articles on these topics, including most recently 'The Labyrinth and the Pit' (History Workshop Journal 51 2001), a study of madness in seventeenth-century autobiography.
Susannah Radstone teaches in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East London. Her research interests are in cultural theory, memory studies and psychoanalysis. Her previous publications include (ed.) Memory and Methodology (2000) and she is currently completing On Memory and Confession, to be published by Routledge.