Project Description
During my Rachel Carson-Simone Veil Fellowship, I will be working on my ongoing book project Slow Memory: Remembering Gradual Change in an Accelerating World (under review with Oxford University Press). This book will introduce, conceptualize and evidence “slow memory” as a fundamentally novel approach to how the past is made meaningful in the present. It will create an intellectual map for this new concept and put forward a new research agenda for interdisciplinary memory studies. The chapter on which I will work during my time in Munich is a particularly good fit with the themes of the Fellowship, as it is fundamentally concerned with how species extinction and biodiversity loss are remembered culturally and how this impacts our ability to take action on the environmental emergency. I have completed my fieldwork on the Isle of Portland (Dorset, UK) where activists have been struggling to erect a memorial to extinct species since 2007. Couched in a broad analysis of the cultural and political discourses on extinction in the context of the climate catastrophe and its framing by the cultural and heritage industries, I will use the Portland case study to advance our understanding of the politics surrounding the memory of biodiversity. This chapter is central to my theoretical argument about how societies remember – and politically and culturally respond to – slow-moving but profound change – from deindustrialization to digitization and value shifts.
Personal Bio
Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University and the Director of the Centre for Public History, Heritage and Memory there. She is the co-founder and past Co-President of the Memory Studies Association, as well as Chair of the COST Action on “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices in Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change” (2021-25). She is the author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (Cambridge UP 2017, in German LIT Verlag/Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2020) and the co-editor, most recently, of Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (with Aline Sierp, Berghahn 2020), the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (with Yifat Gutman, 2023), and De-Commemoration: Making Sense of Contemporary Calls to Remove Statues and Rename Places (with Sarah Gensburger, in English with Berghahn and in French with Fayard in 2023). Her research interests concern the contentious politics of memory, memory and democracy, slow-moving change such as biodiversity loss, and the memory of family separation policies.
More information: https://jennywustenberg.com/