Provost Lecture - Jeffery Olick: What is Memory Studies?

Jeffrey Olick is a professor of sociology and history at the University of Virginia. His publications include In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 (Chicago 2005); The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (Routledge, 2007); and The Collective Memory Reader, with Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy (Oxford, 2011). Across numerous disciplines, scholarly interest in the past 30 years has converged around the concept of memory. What are the sources of this interest? What opportunities does it present, and what obstacles does it face? Olick will focus on two issues: First, he asks to what extent the waning of a “memory boom“ in public culture will alter the landscape of scholarly memory studies. And second, he inquires into the intellectual and institutional conditions that hinder the consolidation of memory studies as a coherent field. He will explore solutions as well as the desirability of such consolidation.