Bahcesehir University, Department of American Culture and Literature is organizing a conference on memory, history and literature.

Place: Bahcesehir University, Istanbul Turkey

Date: 6-7-8-9 May, 2009.

There has been a growing awareness of evaluating history, memory and literature and culture on the same ground over the last years. A rapidly growing interest in memory studies is shared today by different academic disciplines. The French sociologist and master of memory studies Maurice Halbwachs writes that “remembrance is paramount.” Many of the scholars coming from different academic fields examine the past and memory in order to analyze the contemporary or understand the current politics, ideologies and identities better. It is obvious that the most popular of sources for looking at the past are documentaries, historical novels, fictional biographies, fiction, art, and museums. Literary, cultural, intellectual and political history is highly interested in individual, collective, national and cultural memories and their influences both on history and societies themselves.

This conference will discuss how practices of representing and interpreting the past are being reshaped by different disciplines. This conference opts for an academic view of the creation, transmission, causes and consequences of memories. It focuses on the ways in which memories were recurred to and used in the discourses and practices of various academic disciplines.

Researchers from all disciplines are invited to participate: literary and historical studies, women and gender studies, museum studies, media and cultural studies, political sciences, philosophy, sociology, geography and history. Interdisciplinary perspectives are especially welcomed since all these topics in themselves cover several disciplines: history, literary studies, linguistics, psychology, political sciences, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. The conference aims to develop into a unique international academic forum for interpretative approaches in the humanities and social sciences. The conference is designed to be a forum for discussing literal, historical and political memory, remembering and forgetting of the past.

Keynote speakers:

Within this general framework, papers should address one of the following themes:

• Autobiography/ biography as/ and memory
• War and memory (War literature)
• Holocaust and memory
• Novel and/as memory
• Film, adaptation and/as memory
• Imperialism, colonialism and memory (imperial colonial literature)
• Traumatic events and memory (Memory of catastrophe)
• Space, environment, landscape and memory
• Ideologies and memory (religion, politics)
• Re- imaging history
• Oral history and memory
• Race and memory
• Representation and memory
• Museum as an artifact of memory
• Diaspora and memory- placement, displacement
• Collective/individual memory
• Communal heritage and use of memory
• Origin, Text, Memory
• The History, Literature and Memory of Gender
• The Poetics of Remembrance and Forgetting
• Memory and Studies of the Development of Consciousness in literary texts
• Memory and Metaphor in the literary works
• Poetics and Politics of Memory
• Myth, memory and history
• Identity, Culture and memory
• Migration, ethnicity and memory
• Iconography, cult, heroism and memory

Conference attendees should submit:
1. Paper titles
2- Abstracts (1000 words). Accepted formats are Word and PDF.
3- Short biography for each participant and the panel chair (100-150 words),
4- Institutional affiliation and address for each participant,
5- Audio-visual and other technical requirements.

Please send proposals not less than 1000 words for 20-30 minute duration papers to: burcin.cakir@bahcesehir.edu.tr - conferenceonmemory@gmail.com

Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2009
Paper acceptance notification: March 1, 2009

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Gönül Ucele, Yar. Doc. Dr. Gönül Bakay Dr. Övgü Tüzün, Ögr. Gör. Burçin Çakýr , Ögr. Gör. Elif Baţ