2026 Conference: Call for Papers

STS 2026

The New School, New York City, June 3-5

Materiality, Memory, Forgetting:  

Cross-currents in Textual Studies and Memory Studies

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

“Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories . . . history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.” —Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Remembering and forgetting are not just two opposite processes—they are deeply entangled.” —Aleida Assmann, “Cultural Memory and Western Civilization”

“There is no mourning without memory, no memory without mourning.” —Jacques Derrida, “Memoires: For Paul de Man”

This interdisciplinary conference invites scholars to explore the rich and evolving relationship between Textual Studies and Memory Studies, two fields that while historically distinct offer vital and complementary insights into the construction, transmission, and contestation of cultural memory. In an era marked by the disruption and reconfiguration of once-stable social, cultural, and political structures, the questions raised by both disciplines feel increasingly urgent: How is the past preserved, edited, and transmitted through texts (where “text” is broadly conceived)? What role do textual forms, variants, and materialities play in shaping collective memory? How do acts of remembrance and forgetting manifest in the physical and digital traces of culture?

Textual Studies has long been concerned with the integrity, transmission, and material history of texts, offering tools/methodologies to analyze how texts change over time, how editorial decisions shape meaning, and how archives and canons are constructed or challenged. Memory Studies in turn investigates the social, cultural, and political processes through which the past is remembered, suppressed, or reimagined. Together, these fields and their associated methodologies open up powerful ways of thinking about texts as both artifacts of memory and instruments of its ongoing negotiation.

We invite papers that engage with a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to):

  • Texts (broadly conceived) as Sites or Agents of Memory and Forgetting
  • Editorial Practice and the Politics of Remembrance
  • Manuscripts and Memory work
  • Scribal Memory / Print Memory / Digital Memory
  • Text, Palimpsest, Memory
  • Textual Ruins, Fragmentary Memory
  • Text as Monument / Monuments as Text
  • Archival Memory / Archival Forgetting
  • Archives and the Future of Memory
  • Memory, Materiality, and Textual Transmission
  • Textual scholarship in Transitional Justice and Historical Reckoning
  • Memory, Censorship, and the Re-writing of History
  • Canon, Memory, Forgetting: What/whose texts are remembered, whose are forgotten? 
  • AI and Memory / AI’s Memory
  • Editing and Re-memory / Editing and Post-memory
  • Artifacts as Memory Sites 
  • Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches to Memory 
  • Diaspora and the Textual Transmission of Memory 
  • Textual Memory and Decolonization 
  • Queer Memory 
  • Testimony, Trauma, and Textual Forms
  • Aging Bodies / Texts of Memory
  • Memory and the Textual Poetics of Care
  • Memory in Marginalia, Annotations, and Paratexts

We welcome proposals from scholars across the humanities and related fields, including literary studies, history, art history, archival studies, media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies.

Proposed session formats may include workshops/seminars, panels, roundtables, and individual papers. Please submit your proposal by 1 February 2026 to societyfortextualscholarship@gmail.com.

*All talks will be in person, but keynotes will be streamed for remote access.*

Memory Studies: Towards a Bibliography

Assmann, Aleida (2011) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (New York: Cambridge University Press) (orig. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich: Beck 1999).

Assmann, Aleida and Sebastian Conrad, eds. (2010) Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Assmann, Jan (2011) Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (orig. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich: Beck 1992.)

Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds. (1999) Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover and London: University Press of New England).

Carruthers, Mary J. (1990) The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Connerton, Paul (2009) How Modernity Forgets. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Crane, Susan A. (2000) Museums and Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) Cultural Sitings.

Craps, Stef (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

Crownshaw, Rick, ed. (2011) Transcultural Memory, special issue of Parallax 17.4.

Cubitt, Geoffrey (2007) History and Memory: Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Dijck, José van. (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) Cultural Memory in the Present.

Erll, Astrid (2011) Memory in Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney, eds. (2009) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter) Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung 10.

Fritzsche, Peter (2004) Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Garde-Hansen, Joanne Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading, eds. (2009) Save As––Digital Memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Gross, David (2000) Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts).

Halbwachs, Maurice (1941) La topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

Halbwachs, Maurice (1980) The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row).

Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Hirsch, Marianne, and Nancy K. Miller (eds.) (2011). Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press).

Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. (1983) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Kilbourn, Russell (ed.) (2013) The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press).

Landsberg, Alison (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press).

Leydesdorff, Selma, Luisa Passerini and Paul Thompson, eds. (1996) Gender and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Markowitsch, Hans J. and Lars-Göran Nilsson (1999) Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory (Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber).

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (2005) The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso).

Passerini, Luisa, ed. (2005 [1992]) Memory & Totalitarianism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers) Memory and Narrative.

Ricœur, Paul (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Originally published as La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).

Rigney, Ann (2004) “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans”, Poetics Today, 25:2, 361-396

Rigney, Ann (2005) “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory”, Jour2wnal of European Studies, 35:1, 11-28.

Rothberg, Michael (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) Cultural Memory in the Present.

Sutton, John (2006) Memory, Embodied Cognition, and the Extended Mind (Abingdon: Routledge).

Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press).