Research project Beyond Trauma: Memories of the Future and the Futures of Memory
This long-term, multidisciplinary research project explors the relationship between memory and futurity by uniting scholars from memory studies, literary studies, intellectual history, postcolonial, and ecocritical fields.
The project has a dual focus: to examine how literature and cultural narratives imagine the future through engagements with the past, and to shift memory studies beyond its trauma-centered, retrospective orientation toward a framework that foregrounds possible futures. While acknowledging the importance of addressing histories of conflict and violence, it draws on literature’s capacity to envision “memories of the future” and “futures of memory.”
Despite the growth of cultural memory studies over the past four decades, the role of literature in imagining future-oriented memory formations—inflected by hope, fear, desire, or resistance—remains underexplored. This project investigates literary and cultural narratives from diverse cultural and historical contexts—Taiwanese, Ukrainian, African, Caribbean, Slavic, Irish, and Nordic—to explore how they articulate alternative, speculative, or lost futures that reconfigure cultural identities, collective agency, and historical consciousness. It ultimately aims to advance a paradigm shift in memory studies that embraces futurity, narrative experimentation, and challenges unilinear temporalities.
Project members
Project managers
Irmgard Schweiger
Professor
Members
Victoria Fareld
Professor
Olena Jansson
Lecturer
Anna Jörngården Galili
Senior lecturer, associate professor
Alice Sundman
Postdoc
Joakim Wrethed
Professor
Maria Ioana Zirra
Postdoctoral researcher
Richard Crownshaw
Associate Professor of American Literature
Elisabeth Herrmann
Professor of German Studies
Justyna Tabaszewska
Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
Andrea Riemenschnitter
Professor Emerita of Modern Chinese Language and Literature
Pieter Vermeulen
Professor of American and Comparative Literature
Jenny Wüstenberg
Professor of History and Memory Studies
