Working Group in Memory Studies

The UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies seeks to bring together faculty and graduate students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences who are interested in the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies. 

Members of the Working Group with Marianne Hirsch (March 8, 2022).
Members of the Working Group with Marianne Hirsch (March 8, 2022)

Our Working Group in Memory Studies meets throughout the academic year for various different events and occasions. In addition to regular reading group discussions, this group organizes quarterly receptions, seminars with prominent scholars in the field, film viewings, and academic programs, including workshops and conferences. In the past, we have had the pleasure of hosting and organizing events with Professors Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of Birmingham), Sarah Casteel (Carleton University), and Shirli Gilbert (University of Southampton).

Cultural memory studies focuses on the dynamic interplay between the past and the present in local, national, and transnational contexts and can involve the study of works of art and literature; memorials and monuments; processes of reparation, reconciliation, and transitional justice; activist movements; media; and more. In recent years the field has grown rapidly and there is now an international Memory Studies Association.

CONTACT US:

  • Michael Rothberg (Professor of English & Comp Lit), mrothberg@humnet.ucla.edu
  • Hannah Jakobsen (Phd Student in Comp Lit)
  • Janel Pineda (PhD Student in Chicana/o and Central American Studies)
  • Alona Weimer (PhD Student in Comp Lit), alonaweimer@g.ucla.edu

If you would like to join our mailing list, please contact Alona Weimer.

Join our regional Facebook Group! @UC Working Group in Memory Studies

EVENTS

2025-2026 Events

  • March 16, 2026: “”Monuments and Memory“. Building on their work on memory art, Andreas Huyssen and Marianne Hirsch (both from Columbia University) shared provisional impressions of MOCA’s “Monuments” exhibition, asking what happens when monuments enter the museum, or function as art spaces. Are monuments art and/or can the art work function as a monument? The conversation focused on Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone” in relation to Doris Salcedo’s “Fragmentos.”
Michael Rothberg, Andreas Huyssen, and Marianne Hirsch at the “Monuments and Memory” discussion.
Michael Rothberg, Andreas Huyssen, and Marianne Hirsch at the “Monuments and Memory” discussion.
  • February 6, 2026: A Visit to the Monuments exhibition at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
  • December 10, 2025: Reading Group session on Gaming and Memory with Sara Morini (Rome)
  • November 13, 2025: Reading Group session on New Directions in Memory Studies

PAST EVENTS

  • The tenth Mnemonics summer school was hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and its Working Group in Memory Studies. The year’s theme was Violence and Repair. July 9-11, 2024.
  • Winter Quarter Reading Group Session, February 16th, 2024, 3pm, Kaplan 348
  • Friday, December 1, 2023, at 2:30pm PST: Memori Melompat (‘Jumping Memory’): The Mnemonic Motion of Indonesian Popular Culture and the Need for a Local Reframing. A conversation with Arnoud Arps (Amsterdam/UCLA).
Poster for the Working Group in Memory Studies event titled "Memori Melompat ('Jumping Memory'): The Mnemonic Motion of Indonesian Popular Culture and the Need for a Local Reframing", a conversation with Arnoud Arps that took place on December 1, 2023.
  • Friday, October 13, 2023 at 3:30pm PST: Political Geology and the Colonial Continuum. A Conversation with Leopold Lambert (editor of The Funambulist).
Poster for the Working Group in Memory Studies event titled "Political Geology and the Colonial Continuum", a conversation with Leopold Lambert that took place on October 12, 2023.
  • Tuesday, May 30th, 2023 at 9am PST: Memory Poets: Translating the Archive into New Forms. A virtual conversation with Cynthia Dewi Oka, Tirzah Goldenberg, and Vanessa Angélica Villareal.
    How can poets translate history, familial Archives, and national archives into poetry? Acclaimed poets Cynthia Dewi Oka, Tirzah Goldenberg, and Vanessa Angélica Villareal will give short readings from their recent poetry collections before discussing the impulses behind their work and the ways their poetics engages with the landscapes of power, politics, and memory. Moderated by Rachel Kaufman, the discussion will also include time for audience participation.
Poster for the Working Group in Memory Studies event titled "Memory Poets: Translating the Archive into New Forms", a virtual conversation with Cynthia Dewi Oka, Tirzah Goldenberg, and Vanessa Angelica Villareal, which took place on May 30, 2023.
  • Wednesday, April 9th, 2023 at 4pm PST: Representing Environmental Grief. A lecture by Michaela Mihai (Political Theory, Edinburgh).
    Despite growing public concern, environmental loss-accumulating more-than-human deaths, extinct species, ravaged ecosystems – is mostly grieved by environmental scientists, activists, victims, and witnesses of devastation. Thus, over the last decade, numerous autobiographical texts have chronicled environmental grief and attested to a temporal gulf between those who inhabit the accelerating catastrophe and condemn the slow pace of redress, and those trapped in a “business-as-usual” temporality. Building on constructivist theories of representation and political theorists’ engagements with autobiography, Mihai reads these texts as sources of self-authorized representative claims targeting two objective: first, to summon the already grieving into a constituency of shared experience built around a vision of grief compatible with both hope and action; second, to bridge the “segregated temporalities” of hegemonic time and that of environmental activists, scientists and survivors.
Poster for the Working Group in Memory Studies event titled "Representing Environmental Grief: A Lecture by Mihaela Mihai", which took place on April 29, 2023.
  • Tuesday, January 24th, 2023 at 9am PST: Book Launch with the Editors. The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism.
    Join us for a virtual book launch where editors yifat Gutman (Ben-Gurion University) and Jenny Wüstenberg (Nottingham Trent University) present the Handbook and discuss with respondent Brent Kaplan (University of Illinoi Urbana-Champaign).
    The Handbook is the first systemic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling different disciplinary traditions, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence from across the globe, this Handbook establishes the important questions and their theoretical implications arising from the social, political, and economic reality of memory activism.
Poster for the Working Group in Memory Studies event titled "Book Launch with the Editors: The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism", which took place on January 24, 2023.
Two group members stand in front of a scenic waterway in Aarhus for the Mnemonics 2021 Conference “Memory and Migration.”
Two of our group members in Aarhus for the Mnemonics 2021 Conference “Memory and Migration.” Every year, UCLA students attend and present at the annual Mnemonics summer school.
  • January 25, 2021: Working group meeting on “Rethinking Trauma” (discussing Nick Haslam and Melanie J. McGrath’s “The Creeping Concept of Trauma” and Tess Lea’s “Decolonizing Trauma Theory by Way of Housing Disrepair”)
  • November 16, 2020: “From ‘Traveling Memory’ to Memory in the Time of Corona” Second Anniversary Event with Astrid Erll (Professor of Goethe-University Frankfurt)
  • September 17, 2020: Working group meeting on “Memory Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy” (reading Chana Teeger’s “‘Both Sides of the Story’: History Education in Apartheid South Africa”)
  • July 1, 2020: Working group meeting discussing memory studies and the movement for Black lives, monuments, and antiracist pedagogy (reading Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Trayvon Generation” and James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers”)
  • May 15, 2020: Discussion with Yogita Goyal (Professor of UCLA) about her recently published book Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU Press, 2019)
  • February 28-29, 2020: “Memory and Political Responsibility” Conference with Keynote by Ann Rigney (Professor of Utrecht University)
Poster for the Working Group in Memory Studies event titled "Memory and Political Responsibility", which took place on February 28-29, 2020.
Poster from our first UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies conference!

UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies Book Series 2022

Group photo of the members of the Working Group in Memory Studies inside Royce Hall.
Members of the Working Group in Memory Studies at a lecture inside Royce Hall.
Members of the Working Group in Memory Studies enjoying a lunch on the loggia inside Royce Hall.
  • February 4, 2020: Pre-Conference Reading Group Meeting discussing Ann Rigney’s “Differential Memorability and Transnational Activism: Bloody Sunday, 1887-2016” and Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans
  • January 17, 2020: Coffee with Rosanne Kennedy (Professor of Australian National University)
Members of the Working Group in Memory Studies pose with Professor Roseanne Kennedy.
  • December 4, 2019: Coffee with Eric Calderwood (Professor of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Members of the Working Group in Memory Studies pose Eric Calderwood.
  • December 3, 2019: Talk by Eric Calderwood: “The Future of al-Andalus”
  • November 22, 2019: Discussion with Mikhal Dekel (Professor of CCNY and author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey)
Members of the Working Group in Memory Studies pose with Mikhal Dekel at an outdoor patio.
  • November 8, 2019: Reading Group Meeting on “Legacies of Empire” (discussing Ann Laura Stoler’s “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination” and Richard Drayton’s “Rhodes Must Not Fall?”)
  • October 24, 2019: Introductory Reading Group Meeting (discussing Andreas Huyssen’s “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia” and Wulf Kansteiner’s “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies”)
  • June 7, 2019: End-of-Year Celebration and Reading Group Meeting (discussing Francisco Ferrándiz’s “Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism: Engaging with the Spanish Civil War Legacy” and Amber Dean and Angela Failler’s “‘An Amazing Gift’? Memory entrepreneurship, settler colonialism and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights”)
  • May 10, 2019: Coffee with Shirli Gilbert (Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton, UK)
Members of the Working Group in Memory Studies pose with Shirli Gilbert.
  • May 9, 2019: Talk by Shirli Gilbert: “South African Jews, the Holocaust, and Apartheid”
  • May 3, 2019: Coffee with Sarah Casteel (Professor of English at Carleton University)
  • May 2, 2019: Talk by Sarah Casteel: “Global Itineraries of Holocaust Memory: The Jewish Caribbean and Nazi Persecution in Literature and Art”
  • April 17, 2019: Reading Group Meeting on “Museums and Restitution” (discussing pieces by Ariella Azoulay and Chip Colwell)
  • April 5, 2019: Discussion with Lyndsey Stonebridge (Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham)
  • April 4, 2019: Talk by Lyndsey Stonebridge: “Hannah Arendt’s Messages of Ill Tidings”
  • March 15, 2019: Reading Group Meeting on Monuments and Counter-monuments
  • March 5, 2019: Pre-Release Film Screening of the film Transit (organized by the German department)
  • February 15, 2019: Reading Group Meeting (discussing Dilara Caliskan’s “‘Nobody Is Going To Let You Attend Your Own Funeral’ A Funeral for a Trans Woman and Naming the Unnamed” and Douglas Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy”)
  • January 18, 2019: Reading Group Meeting (discussing Ann Rigney’s “Remembering Hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic” and Stephen Best’s “On Failing to Make the Past Present”)
  • November 28, 2018: First Working Group in Memory Studies Meeting (introducing the group and discussing Astrid Erll’s “Travelling Memory” and Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen’s “On Agonistic Memory”)