The Memory Network

Project Team:

Principal Investigator:

Dr Sebastian Groes, University of Roehampton

Co-Investigators: 

Professor Patricia Waugh, Durham University

Dr Alison Waller, The University of Roehampton

Award Information:

The Memory Network is a multi-disciplinary enterprise that brings together researchers, authors and artists and organisations to provoke and fuel original thinking about memory in the twenty-first century.

Writers and critics working in the arts and humanities are now seriously engaging with new critical perspectives offered by biosciences, psychology and computer science to explore individual and collective memory in literary narratives, while scientist acknowledge the benefits of engaging with creative ideas and the ethical and hermeneutic perspectives offered through fictional explorations and humanities disciplines. The Memory Network aims to foster a profound and sustained engagement with these emerging models of memory and the ways in which they might generate or illuminate literary production. It moves away from existing postmodern ways of thinking about memory which focus on historical amnesia, memorialisation, trauma and nostalgia. Instead of these socio-cultural and therapeutic narratives, the Network is interested in mobilising the transformative and dynamic potential of memory, consciousness and cognition as a subject of literary- scientific enquiry.