Paper presentation sessions are open to summer school participants only, but the keynote lectures are open to the general public.
Wednesday 2 September 2026
18:00 conference pre-events
***
Thursday 3 September 2026
9:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks
10:00-11:00 Wulf Kansteiner Memorial Lecture
Aleida Assmann (University Constance, Germany):
Concepts of the Future and the Ethics of Repair
11:00-11:30 Coffee
*
11:30-13:00 Panel 1: Time Regimes
Chair: Hanna Teichler
Respondent: Susanne Knittel
Ellinor Eriksson (Stockholm University, Sweden):
Memories of Loss. Time Regimes in the Swedish ‘Land of the Future’
Thea Bladt (Aarhus University, Denmark):
“The Ultimate Memento:” Mapping Official Redress of Colonialism in Denmark and the Netherlands, 1990s-2025
Eviya Hovhannisyan (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Yerevan, Armenia):
Railways of Empire: Infrastructural Memory and Post-Imperial Futures in Armenia
13:00-14:00 Lunch
*
14:00-15:30 Panel 2: Temporal Dynamics and Practices
Chair: Victoria Fareld
Respondent: Hans Ruin
Rupal Bansal (Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom):
Curfewed Nights and Continuous Pasts: Nocturnal Memory and Future Horizons in Kashmiri Memoirs
Gözde Yilmaz Çıldır (Ege University, İzmir, Turkey):
Witnessing Before Violence: Pre-Trauma Testimony, Pedagogy, and the Memory of Future Catastrophe
Elisabetta Visaggio (King’s College London, United Kingdom):
Future Mythologies: Navigating Entangled Mnemonic Temporalities through Myth
15:30-16:00 Coffee
*
16:00-17:30 Panel 3: Futures after the Holocaust
Chair: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
Respondent: Anna Reading
Michalina Musielak (University of Warsaw, Poland):
The Future of Holocaust Museums: Empirical research on the ‘hidden power of implicit collective memory’ in ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ museums in Poland and Germany
Siri Janfelt Mose (University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark):
Anticipating Jewish Identity in the Wake of Contemporary Conflicts: Dana Vowinckel’s novel Gewässer im Ziplock (2023)
Chris Groenveld (Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom):
Layers of Extraction: Platform Reviews and the Futures of Holocaust Memory
17:30-18:15 Refreshments
*
18:15-19:15 Keynote 2:
Christina Morina (University Bielefeld, Germany):
Remembering Despair: Historical Experience and the Possibility of a Democratic Future
20:00 Conference Dinner at Depot 1899
***
Friday 4 September 2026
9:30-11:00 Panel 4: Future and Mnemonic Space
Chair: Johanna Vollmeyer
Respondent: Lucy Bond
Marion De Schepper (Ghent University, Belgium):
Witnessing Plants: Rethinking Witnessing with Eyeless, Brainless, and Wordless Plants
Anjelyque Easley-DeLuca (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States):
Post-War Remembrance and Context in Rural and Urban Landscapes in the 20th Century and Beyond
Helene Weinbrenner (University of Basel, Switzerland):
Intertemporal Justice, Environmental Ethos, and Literary Narrative
11:00-11:30 Coffee
*
11:30-13:00 Professional Development Session:
Publishing Monographs, Placing Journal Articles, Navigating Social Media Presence
with
Stef Craps (on social media use in memory studies)
Lucy Bond & Rick Crownshaw & Jessica Rapson (on Bloomsbury’s Critical Memory Studies-book series)
Astrid Erll (on De Gruyter’s Media and Cultural Memory– book series)
Anna Reading (on the journal Media, Culture & Society)
Hanna Teichler (on the journal Memory Studies Review)
Johanna Vollmeyer (on Brill’s Mobilizing Memory-book series)
13:00-14:00 Lunch
*
14:00-15:30 Panel 5: Futures of Contested Memories
Chair: David Mwambari
Respondent: Sara Dybris McQuaid
Danyel Büyükaşık (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany):
Displacement in Open Time: Unfinished Memory and Future Livabilities in Contemporary Levantine Writings
Lale Diklitas (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany):
From the Prophet to Postcolonialism: Imagining #islamicblackhistory on Instagram
Ekim Diren Safak (University of Lund, Sweden):
Uses and Contestations of Memory: Pro-Palestine Activism and in Sweden and Norway
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
*
16:00 -17:30 Panel 6: Forms and Genres of Literary Future Thinking
Chair: Stef Craps
Respondent: Rick Crownshaw
Cooper Lynn (UCLA, Los Angeles, United States):
Koliszczyzna i stepy (1838): From Deconstruction to Postmemory
Svetlana Baranova (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland):
Narrating the Future: Climate Fiction and the Memory-Imagination Nexus
Matthew Fam (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States):
Goddess is Within Me: Myth, Flooding, and the Apocalyptic Present in Khairani Barokka’s Poetry
17:30-18:00 Refreshments
*
18:00-19:00 Keynote 3
Silvana Mandolessi (KU Leuven, Belgium):
There Is No Alternative (to the Digital): Architected Memory in the Age of Platforms
*
19:00-19:45 Mnemonics Business Meeting
19:00 Dinner in town for Ph.D. students (self-pay)
20:00 Partners’ Dinner at Omonia
***
Saturday 5 September 2026
9:30-11:00 Panel 7: Platformized Futures
Chair: Silvana Mandolessi
Respondent: Alexander Ulrich Thygesen
Saartje van den Bossche (UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium):
The Digital Circulation of Gwangju Memory and Democratic Futures in South Korea
Sepideh Saghafian (EPHE, Paris, France):
The Nostalgia of the Future: Platformized Monarchist Memory and Authoritarian Imaginaries in the Iranian Diaspora”
Vlada Sabadash (V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine):
From “Forever Together” to “Never Again”: Digital Semiotics and Symbolic Demarcation in Ukrainian Memory Culture
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break
*
11:30-13:00 Panel 8: Futuristic Memories in the Digital Age
Chair: Jessica Ortner-Nielsen
Respondent: Jessica Rapson
Srija Bharadwaj (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India):
Algorithmic Forgetting Before AI: Memory and the Disappearance of Objects in The Memory Police
Geethapriya Chandramohan (Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India):
Beyond Remembering: Posthuman Memory and the Future of Memory Studies in AI-Saturated Worlds
Lolly Sillitoe (University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom):
“Future Days” of The Last of Us Part II: Encountering Cordyceps Chronology
*
13:00-14:00 Lunch
after 14:00 Post-Conference Walking Tour
Header image: Adorno Memorial at Goethe University Frankfurt (Image rights: Uwe Dettmar, Goethe University Frankfurt)
