Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies

Though still a relatively young field, memory studies has undergone significant transformations since it first coalesced as an area of inquiry. Increasingly, scholars understand memory to be a fluid, dynamic, unbound phenomenon―a process rather than a reified object. Embodying just such an elastic approach, this state-of-the-field collection systematically explores the transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary dimensions of memory―four key dynamics that have sometimes been studied in isolation but never in such an integrated manner. Memory Unbound places leading researchers in conversation with emerging voices in the field to recast our understanding of memory’s distinctive variability.

Lucy Bond is a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Westminster and a founder of the London Cultural Memory Consortium. She is the author of Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and a coeditor (with Jessica Rapson) of The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and beyond Borders (De Gruyter, 2014).

Stef Craps is an associate professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005).

Pieter Vermeulen is an assistant professor of American and comparative literature at the University of Leuven. He is the author of Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2010).