Meet our Leadership Team
Jenny Wüstenberg
Action Chair
Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies and co-lead of AIMS@NTU (Advancing Interdisciplinary Memory Studies at NTU) at Nottingham Trent University (UK). She was the founding Co-President of the Memory Studies Association, and is the 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 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: Removing Statues and Renaming Place (with Sarah Gensburger, 2023 in French and English). She is the co-editor of the book series Worlds of Memory (Berghahn). Her research interests concern the contentious politics of memory, slow-moving change including biodiversity loss, the legacies of state-driving family separation policies and methodology in memory studies. Jenny is German, British and Australian and loved living in Canada from 2016-2019.
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Action Co-Chair | WG1 Chair
Joanna Wawrzyniak is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Poland. Historian and sociologist by training, she specializes in East-Central European memory processes. Her current projects include research on memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation, and deindustrialization in Poland and contributions to collaborative research on cultural heritage and memory processes in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and East and South Asia. Joanna has long standing expertise in oral history and museum research. She has published, among others, in Heritage and Society; Memory Studies; Contemporary European History; East European Politics and Societies; and Polish Sociological Review. Her books in English include co-edited Regions of Memory: Transnational Formations (forthcoming), Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (2016); co-authored The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (2015); and Veterans, Victims and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (2015). Her most recent co-authored book in Polish Cięcia. Mówiona historia transformacji (The Cuts: Oral History of Transformation, Wyd. Krytyka Polityczna 2020) won an award of POLITYKA weekly for the best historical book of 2020. Her work was supported by grants of the European Commission, national agencies, and fellowships at several European universities. Joanna has been the leader of Work Packages in Horizon 2020 projects, ECHOES and DisTerrMem; member of the Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association (2019-2022); and the Chair of the Program Committee of the 5th Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association ‘Convergences’, 2021.
Stefan Berger
WG1 Co-Chair
Stefan Berger is Director of the Institute for Social Movements and Professor of Social History at Ruhr University of Bochum. He is also the Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr, a public-private partnership foundation involving the Land NorthRhine Westphalia, the city of Bochum, the university of Bochum, the IGBCE and major employers in the region, above all the Ruhrkohle AG. Its foundation capital is 6 million Euros. Its support research into the history of the Ruhr region and has done important research into the deindustralisation processes of the Ruhr. Berger is also an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK and a Dinstinguished Short-Term Recurring Visiting Professor at Tianjin Normal University in China. He is the co-editor of Industrial
Heritage and Regional Identity (Routledge, 2018), co-editor of a special issue of The Public Historian on deindustralisation and industrial heritage (2017), editor of Constructing Industrial Pasts (Berghahn Books, 2019) and co-editor of a special edition of Labor on deindustralisation and industrial heritage (1:2019). He has published to date 6 monographs and edited more than 20 edited books and special issues of journals as well as writing more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. He has led large-scale research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme, the European Science Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany and many other funding bodies in the UK and Germany. He has been teaching on deindustrialisation and industrial heritage in comparative perspective at Ruhr University since 2012. The Institute has many postdoctoral researchers and PhD students working on this topic.
The Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University of Bochum is a central cross-faculty research department of the university with approximately 80 affiliated researchers and its
own dedicated buildings in the university. Its research infrastructure includes the most comprehensive library in Germany on the topics of labour movements, deindustralisation and the structural transformation of regions of heavy industry, an archive (including the archives of the mining, energy and chemical industries union in Germany, the IGBCE, the archives of the administrative body of the Ruhr region, the Regionalverband Ruhr, and many archives relating to the deindustralisation of the Ruhr, e.g. the archives of the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park. The archive also includes over 100 interviews related to the deindustrialisation of the mining industry in the Ruhr. There are meeting rooms, a reading room, a conference and lecture room.
As Full Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (since 2011) he has been centrally involved in a number of externally funded research projects that have sought to compare transnationally the experience of deindustrialization and the role of industrial heritage in those processes of deindustrialization. His position as executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr has allowed him to reach deep into the regional history of the Ruhr as Germany’s foremost area of heavy industry, from which he developed transregional perspectives on the way in which particular narratives of industrialization and deindustrialization have impacted on regional identities, both spatial and social.
He has been running three externally funded graduate schools since 2013: one on
‘Working class education in regions of heavy industry’ funded by the RAG Foundation (2016 – 2020), one on ‘Social change and the worlds of work in Germany between the 1950s and the present day’ (Hans-Böckler Foundation, 2016 – 2020), and one ‘Left wing social movements between the worlds of Social Democracy and Communism in the twentieth century’ (Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation 2013 – 2017). There are currently around 30 PhD students at the Institute of Social Movements, as well as half a dozen postdocs and four permanent members of staff – many of whom are engaged on topics related to the history of deindustrialization, memory studies and labour history as well as the history of historiography. This makes the Institute arguably the primary research institution in Germany dealing with the history of deindustrialization, social movements and labour history. It also owns the largest research collection of books and archival materials related to this topic in Germany – with well over half a million books and considerable archival holdings. The latter comprise important oral history archives, which derive largely from a RAG-funded project in which we interviewed around a hundred employees of the mining industry to find out about their experience of deindustrialization from the late 1950s onwards. He has also co-edited a volume on the realms of memory of the Ruhr region, entitled Zeit-Räume Ruhr: Erinnerungsorte des Ruhrgebiets (Klartext, 2019), which is an in-depth analysis of the memory cultures of the former foremost region of heavy industry in Germany. He is also general editor of a fourvolume handbook-series on the history of mining in Germany published between 2012 and 2015, in which he has authored the article on industrial heritage.
He has considerable experience in managing, as Principal Investigator, large collaborative projects, as he ran European-wide projects, funded by both the European Science Foundation in the 2000s and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programmes in the 2010s. It involved dozens of core institutional partners and more than 250 academics from 29 European countries.
Since 2017 he has been Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. Here he has been collaborating of late in particular with Professor Bella Dicks who is also working on aspects of industrial heritage in South Wales. Our cooperation, including cooperation with Marion Fontaine, who is also part of the SSHRC application, resulted in the publication of a joint article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies on ‘Community: a Useful Concept in Heritage Studies?’ (published 17 June 2019). He has also been collaborating with Kevin Passmore and Heiko Feldner at Cardiff University with whom he is general editor of a multi-volume book series entitled Writing History: Theory and Practice, with Bloomsbury, that is concerned with providing links between the theory of history and the practice of historical writing.
He is also general editor, together with Holger Nehring from the University of Sterling, of a book series entitled Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements (with Palgrave MacMillan) in which many studies explore the role of social movements in global perspective. As social movements also played an important role in processes of industrialization and deindustrialization, this is a significant topic in the book series, with several volumes addressing it. The Institute for Social Movement’s journal, Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements, edited by himself and his colleague Sean Scalmer from the University of Melbourne, is also centrally concerned with topics that are relevant to this application.
As founding president of the German Labour History Association, created in 2017, he is also centrally involved in pushing topics related to this application within German labour history. For the journal German History he has, in 2019, guest edited a special issue on the topic ‘What is New in German Labour History?’ Already his PhD (University of Oxford, 1991) was on comparative labour history and he has also subsequently worked a lot on diverse aspects of transnational and comparative labour history. One recent example is the edited collection on The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). The comparative approach to history that he has been pursuing throughout his career is also visible in his last monograph but one: The Past as History, which deals with the impact of national histories on national identities in 29 European countries. His last monograph, published with Cambridge University Press in 2022, is entitled ‘History and Identity: How Historical Theory Shapes Historical Practice’.
Kateřina Králová
WG2 Co-Chair
Kateřina Králová is Associate Professor of Contemporary History and former Head of the Department of Russian and East European Studies (2017-2021), Institute of International Studies, Charles University (CUNI). As a historian, her work focuses on reconciliation with the Nazi past, the Holocaust, the Greek Civil War, conflict-related migration, and post-war reconstruction. By giving voice to war survivors and their eyewitness accounts, she empowers and flourishes the memory of “invisible” non-elites. K. Králová, analumna of Phillips University Marburg, has been awarded major international fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, a USHMM fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship at Yale University, and has thus conducted a substantial part
of her research abroad. In addition, she received the 2017 Scholarly Society Award for Scientists Under 40 for her research achievements. She isone of the founders of the Herzl Center for Israel Studies at CUNI, the 4EU+ Alliance Winter School “Memory in Conflict”, the CENTRAL project “Institutionalizing Memory in Post-Conflict Societies”, and others. Before joining COST-Action Slow Memory, she served as anMC member of the COST-Action COMPACT project (2015-2020)and local organizer of its final meeting. In 2022, the Claims Conference supported her application for Holocaust Teaching Partnership, which has been awarded to CUNI. K. Králová is the author of Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung: Deutsch-griechische Beziehungen seit 1940 (Böhlau, 2016; BpB 2017), numerous articles and volumes in Czech, English, German and Greek, and is an active member of several editorial boards. The manuscript of her second book on Holocaust survivors in Greece is currently under review by a US university press.
Marileen La Haije
WG2 Co-Chair
Marileen La Haije is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research centers on the intersections between art, mental health and human rights, with a particular focus on Latin America. Currently she studies diverse Latin American arts-based practices (e.g., collaborative storytelling, mural arts, textile workshops) that promote the rights of people in situations of psychological vulnerability, in and outside mental health facilities. As part of this research, La Haije is particularly interested in arts-based practices of storytelling (e.g., theater groups, narrative games) that seek to promote the rights of children in situations of psychological vulnerability. She has built an extensive network of non-academic stakeholders (e.g., artistic collectives, health care workers, human rights advocates) and scholars from different interdisciplinary fields (e.g., Latin American studies, human rights research, narrative medicine) across Latin America and Europe, with whom she collaborates through co-teaching, joint publications and public engagement activities. Moreover, she has a solid base of international experience as (visiting) researcher in Europe (e.g., Netherlands, Germany) and Latin America (e.g., Argentina, Costa Rica), and a well-developed set of teaching and supervision skills in interdisciplinary and international settings.
Maija Spurina
WG3 Co-Chair
A researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Latvian Academy of Culture. Her research interests involve culture, memory, and digitization. She received the PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York. She worked on nationalism, memory narratives, public vs. private memories with emphasis on post-Soviet region. In Fall 2018 she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Baltic Studies at Yale University in New Haven, where she worked on commemoration of the Holocaust in Latvia. From 2019 to 2021 she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Latvian Academy of Culture conducting a research digitization of national museum collections, and using them as data to explore national and transnational storage memory. Currently she is the leading researcher in a project “Meaning and Practice of Autonomy in Gig-Work: Sociocultural Inquiry in Experience of Wolt and Bolt Delivery Workers in Riga” that focuses on how gig-work is practiced, perceived and felt, and, thereby, contributing to understanding of how social relations and culture is changing in the age of algorithmic management and digital capitalism The central conceptual focus is the autonomy of gig-workers, both as narrated by the platform and by the workers, and as played out in the interaction between the workers and the algorithm.
Sara Jones
WG3 Co-Chair
Sara Jones is a Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the cultural, social and political processes of remembering, with a particular emphasis on post-socialism and the role of first-person accounts. She has led numerous funded projects and is currently Principal Investigator of Post-Socialist Britain?: Memory, Representation and Political Identity amongst German, Polish and Ukrainian Immigrants in the UK. This work explores the relationship between memory and identity as it emerges in the context of migration and explores Britain as a “post-Cold War” space, including consideration of the interwoven “slow” memories of the post-socialist and post-colonial. Sara has published five books, most recently Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context (2022) and (with Roger Woods) The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture (2023).
Chris Reynolds
WG4 Co-Chair/Education Coordinator
Chris Reynolds is Professor of Contemporary European History and Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His main research interests are in relation to the events of 1968 from a French, Northern Irish and European perspective. In addition to a wide range of articles and chapters on these topics, he is the author of Memories of May ’68: France’s Convenient Consensus (University of Wales Press 2011) and Sous les pavés…The Troubles: Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968 (Peter Lang 2015). He has also led a major collaboration with National Museums Northern Ireland on the Northern Irish events of 1968.
Orli Fridman
WG4 Co-Chair
Orli Fridman is an associate professor at the Belgrade based Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK), where she heads the Center for Comparative Conflict Studies (CFCCS). She also is the academic director of the School for International Training (SIT) learning center in Serbia. She is the author of Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) and of numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters. Her research focuses on critical peace and conflict studies, memory politics, digital and onsite memory activism. Fridman’s current research addresses the comparative analysis of alternative and disputed commemorative events in the Western Balkans, Israel-Palestine and beyond.
Jessica Rapson
WG5 Co-Chair
Dr Jessica Rapson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her research concerns the politics of commemoration and the mediation of memory in contemporary heritage and culture. Her work includes: Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (Berghahn 2015), edited collections including The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (de Gruyter, 2014) and Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge 2018). Jessica is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme trust funded project, “Processing Memory: Heritage, Industry, and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States”, which explores the intersection of racial and environmental violence at heritage and tourist sites across the Deep South.
Lucy Bond
WG5 Co-Chair
Dr Lucy Bond is a Reader in Cultural Memory and Trauma Studies at the University of Westminster. She has published widely on the culture and politics of memory and trauma. Her work includes: Frames of Memory After 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics and Law (Palgrave 2015) and the New Critical Idiom guide to Trauma (Routledge 2020, co-authored with Stef Craps). Lucy has also published a number of co-edited collections, including: The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (de Gruyter, 2014); Memory Unbound: New Directions in Memory Studies (Berghahn 2016); and Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge 2018). Lucy is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme trust funded project, “Processing Memory: Heritage, Industry, and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States”, which explores the intersection of racial and environmental violence at heritage and tourist sites across the Deep South.
Vjollca Krasniqi
WG6 Chair
Dr. Vjollca Krasniqi is a sociologist. She is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, and Faculty of Arts, University of Prishtina. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Ljubljana, an M.Sc. degree in Gender, Development, and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a BA degree in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Prishtina. Her research interests are gender, nation-building, human rights, post-war justice, and social policy. She has led and participated in numerous international research projects and published widely on these issues.She is a member of the steering committee of the Memory Studies Association Regional Group South East Europe.Her recent publications include: Are we putting human rights into practice in Kosovo (co-author with Jane McPherson and Tatiana Villarreal-Otalora 2021); Skirts and Words: The Art of Acknowledgment, War Time Rape and Albanian Nationhood in Kosovo (co-author with Ivor Sokolić and Denisa Kostovicova 2020); Domestic Violence: Gendered State Rationality and Women’s Activism in Kosovo (2019); Migration and Human Rights in Kosovo: Perspectives for Social Work Education (2019). She is the co-chair of the Training and Capacity Building Working Group.
Isabel Machado Alexandre
WG6 Co-Chair
Isabel Machado Alexandre is an assistant professor at the School of Technology and Architecture at ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. She is also the head of the Information Technology Group, whose research focuses mainly on artificial intelligence at IT-IUL (a delegation of the Telecommunications Institute). Her research interests include applying artificial intelligence to various contexts (education, tourism, health), and developing systems based on human-centered artificial intelligence that can retain control and benefit transparently and ethically from advances in artificial intelligence. She also headed the MEM+ research project, which promoted research into a computerized environment for people with dementia. She is currently involved in international research through participation in COST actions and the INCITIES project. In 2017, she co-founded NewDigitalSkills, a programming and robotics academy aimed at promoting digital literacy among young people.
Hanna Teichler
WG7 Co-Chair/Science Communications Officer
Hanna Teichler is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She holds a PhD from the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt, and a M.A. degree in English, French and Portuguese philology. Her first monograph Carnivalizing Reconciliation came out with Berghahn in 2021. Hanna is the co-editor (with Rebekah Vince) of the book series Mobilizing Memories and of the Handbook Series in Memory Studies (both Brill). She co-directs (with Astrid Erll) the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform and recently joined the COST Action Slow Memory (led by Jenny Wüstenberg and Joanna Wawrzyniak) as a Working Group Co-Chair (with Frédéric Clavert).
Taylor McConnell
WG7 Co-Chair
Taylor McConnell is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Film, Theatre, Media and Cultural Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His doctoral thesis in sociology at the University of Edinburgh addressed the intersection of memory, violence, power and identity in the context of the 1991–1995 Croatian War of Independence/‘Homeland War’ and its aftermath. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Memory abuse: Historical violence and contemporary identity politics in the former Yugoslavia, to be completed in 2024. His next project, “Sheetz Run: Memory, Identity and Belonging in a Pennsylvania Intersection” (2024–2028), will take an ethnographic lens to gas stations and local identity in a prototypical “Small Town USA”.
Natalie Braber
Language Coordinator
Natalie Braber is Professor of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University. Her main research interests are in the field of sociolinguistics, examining accents and dialects in the East Midlands. This research also includes the topic of ‘pit talk’, the language of coal miners in the region. Furthermore, her work focuses on language as heritage and how language is an important aspect of our identity. Her work also includes examining the role of accent judgement as part of earwitness testimony. As well as many articles and chapters on these topics, Natalie has also recently published Sociolinguistics in England (with Sandra Jansen, Palgrave, 2018), East Midlands English (with Jonnie Robinson, Mouton de Gruyter, 2018) and Lexical Variation of an East Midlands Mining Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Natalie has carried out projects with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Arts Council and the British Association of Applied Linguistics and much of this work has focused on working with community groups, artists, musicians and writers.
Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim
Grant Awarding Coordinator
Dr. Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender) at Sabancı University. She graduated from Istanbul University with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. She holds two MA degrees in Gender Studies from Istanbul University and Central European University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University with her dissertation entitled “Trauma, Survival and Survivance in Contemporary Anglophone and Turkish Literature: Materiality Beyond Mind.”
As a comparatist literary scholar by training, her research lies at the intersection of Anglophone postcolonial literature, Middle Eastern literature, cultural trauma and memory studies, and environmental humanities. In addition to a comparative focus on trauma and violence representation in postcolonial Anglophone and Middle Eastern literatures, her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, narrative theory, feminist and queer narratology, animism, and critical posthumanism. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-IIE, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars, The Institute for World Literature (IWL), and several Washington University fellowships. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as European Review, Intertexts, The Journal of World Literature (BRILL), Monograf, Varlık, Birikim, as well as edited volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma; Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film; Subaltern Women’s Narratives: Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies; Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers. She is a co-author of Gaflet: Türkçe Edebiyatın Cinsiyetçi Sinir Uçları (Turkish), (Metis, 2019). Gundogan Ibrisim’s research and teaching is shaped by values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is committed to making higher education accessible, inspiring, and a tool for social justice for all students. In addition to her fields of study, she also incorporates her background in translation studies into her teaching practice and understands translation as a vibrant tool to make cross-border traveling of knowledge production possible.
Gundogan Ibrisim serves as the official Management Committee Member for Turkey of the Cost Action Project: CA20105 – Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change (2021-2025). She also acts as the Grant Writing Coordinator in this action.
Vjeran Pavlaković
STSM Coordinator
Vjeran Pavlaković is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his Ph.D. in History in 2005 from the University of Washington, and has published articles on cultural memory, transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia, and the Spanish Civil War. He is a co-editor of the volumeFraming the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia (Routledge, 2019), and other recent publications include “The Legacy of War and Nation-Building in Croatia since 1990,” in Balkan Legacies: The Long Shadow of Conflict andIdeological Experiment in Southeastern Europe (Purdue UP, 2021), and “Memory Politics inthe Former Yugoslavia” in Yearbook of the Institute of East-Central Europe (2020). He wasthe lead researcher on the Memoryscapes project as part of Rijeka’s European Capital ofCulture in 2020 and a co-founder of the Cres Summer School on Transitional Justice andMemory Politics. Current research includes transnationalmuralization of conflict and a history of Dalmatian immigrants in the American Southwest.
Banner Credit: Sarah Gensburger
