Memories of Protest
A Lecture by Ann Rigney
Free, until full capacity is reached
Lecturer and researcher Ann Rigney is a key reference point within contemporary memory studies, conducting research that is situated at the intersections of prose, collective identity and the elusive past.
In recent years, she has developed the project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe for the European Research Council (ERC), which shines a light on the nexus between memory and activism with respect to cultures of protest in Europe since midway through the nineteenth century. This lecture, organised within the Memory and Forms Seminar from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, Connective Tissue, sees Rigney and anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz engage in conversation about the dimensions, scopes and possibilities of this and other projects under way, with both outlining the main lines of reflection in their work.
Rigney’s emphasis on mapping the memories of utopia and hope consolidates a trend in memory studies which entails moving beyond the main paradigms of their analysis, indebted to the theories of trauma and victimisation. One such paradigm encompasses “cosmopolitan memories”, a term coined by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider which centres on the recollection of violent and tragic historical events: from military coup d’états to genocides, “new wars” and forced displacement differing in nature and scope.
Participants
Ann Rigney has been a professor of Comparative Literature at Universiteit Utrecht since 2003. She is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Europe, as well as an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2017, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Aarhus Universitet and in 2021 she received the Belgian Francqui Chair from Universiteit Antwerpen, where she directed the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication. Further, she has published works in the field of modern memory cultures, in both the nineteenth century and recent developments, and has played an active role in studies on cultural memory, with the stress placed on questions related to mediation and transnationalism.
Francisco Ferrándiz holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a tenured scientist at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology (ILLA) from the Spanish National Research Council’s (CSIC) Centre for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS), and a lecturer at different European and American universities. His publications span cultural studies, common religions and visual, medical, body- and violence-based anthropology, with an emphasis on memory and social trauma. He is the head researcher on the RDI project “The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain: Taking Stock of a Decade of Exhumations”.