2026 Graduate Workshop | Memory Matters: Non-Human Agents in Memory Studies
Organizers: Anni-Lotta Hamer, Teona Ivashchenko, Elisa Mucciarelli (Regensburg)
Where? Room 319, Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4, 93047 Regensburg
When? 5-6 February 2026 - starting at 9:00 each day
Registration: gsoses.conference@ur.de
- Please find the full programme here. Any interested attendees are requested to register at: gsoses.conference@ur.de
The 2026 graduate workshop Memory Matters: Non-Human Agents in Memory Studiesinvites participants to explore entanglements between material culture and memory studies. Over the course of two days, we aim to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue among early-career scholars, including doctoral researchers and postdocs in the fields of cultural studies, (comparative) literature, art history, environmental history, and anthropology. Rather than viewing materials, objects, geological strata and the environment as mere backdrops or passive settings, we seek to highlight how they function as both archives of (collective) memory and agents that foster memory practices outside, beyond, and at times against well-established institutions and dominant narratives. The workshop should serve as a platform to address theoretical difficulties that arise from focusing on materialities in the context of memory studies and a venue to present empirical case studies.
The workshop’s keynote takes place on Thursday 5th February from 2:15 to 3:45 pm - Simon Probst (Vechta) will discuss Coral Memories: How Reefs Shape Cultural Imaginaries of Time in North America and Europe. The programme features five thematic panels:
- Artistic Practices of Ecological Remembrance
- Post-Soviet Environmental Memory Across Water, Earth, and Screen,
- Elemental Afterimages of Socialism in Comparative Literature
- Material Testimonies in Slavic-Jewish Literature
- Decoloniality and the Reconfiguration of Material Pasts.
The workshop will be followed by a journalist talk with Anna Romandash on her work Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond (2023).
Please find the full programme here. Any interested attendees are requested to register at: gsoses.conference@ur.de
The workshop is organised by the Graduate School for East and Southeast European StudiesUR in cooperation with the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Europe and America in the Modern World". The journalist talk is kindly supported by The Center for Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies “Denkraum Ukraine” (Think Space Ukraine) at the University of Regensburg.
