"Music and Moving Memory"

This lectures offers an introduction to transcultural memory studies and considers the role of music in processes of ‘moving memory’. Transcultural memory research is based on the insight that memory is not tightly bound to temporal and spatial (local, regional, national) frames, but that contents, media, and forms of memory travel across borders and find a new life in different contexts. A rich field of research, transcultural memory studies has addressed the globalization of Holocaust memory, memories of migration, or the incessant travels of old stories like the Odyssey. Surprisingly, though, there is little consideration of music in the process of transcultural memory. This lecture wants to explore how a perspective on music could enrich our understanding of moving memory.

Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She has worked on German, British, South Asian, American, and African literatures and media cultures. Her research interests include literary history (focus on 19th-21st centuries), media history (focus on film and photography), English and comparative literature, cultural theory, media theory, narratology, transcultural studies and – last not least – memory studies. In 2011, Astrid Erll founded the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, a vibrant forum for memory studies across the disciplines, connecting researchers both in Frankfurt and internationally.

Astrid Erll is general editor of the book series Media and Cultural Memory (with A. Nünning, De Gruyter, since 2004) and co-editor of A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (with A. Nünning, 2010) and Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (with A. Rigney, 2009). More recently, she published with Ann Rigney Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe (Image & Narrative, 2017) and Cultural Memory after the Transnational Turn (Memory Studies, 2018). She is author of Memory in Culture (Palgrave 2011), an introduction to memory studies which was originally published in German as Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2005, 3rd ed. 2017) and has also been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Polish.