The
project "Memoria Romana: Memory in Roman Civilization" was
initiated in 2009 with the award of a Max-Planck Prize for International
Cooperation, in the amount
of EUR 750,000, to Professor Karl
Galinsky, Cailloux
Centennial Professor of Classics and Distinguished
Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
In the humanities, this award is made every four years and
the subject is specified; in this case it was Gedächtnisgeschichte. The project is based at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, which made the successful
application.
Historical
scholarship centers on determining what actually happened
and why (cf. von Ranke’s famous dictum, so zu schreiben wie es war). Studies of historical, social,
and cultural memory are complementary: they concentrate on
what people, and especially groups of people, remember,
how these memories evolve, and how they shape identities.
Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence. Memory
pervades all aspects of Roman culture: literature (incl.
historiography), art, architecture, religion, and social
and political history. Memory, therefore, is a concrete
entity in Roman civilization and modern memory approaches
do not need to be imposed artificially or extraneously on
this organic presence.
The major
undertaking, with a large allocation of funds, in the
first two years of the project was to support the work
especially of younger scholars in this area on an
international basis (the modalities for the applications
can be accessed here,
for informational purposes). We received many more
applications than we could fund and the funds have been
expended as of late 2011. We are supporting 14 doctoral
fellowships (several for two years) and 17 other research
projects by postdocs. The objective has been to employ and
test some perspectives, methods, and impulses from current
work on Gedächtnisgeschichte (a.k.a. the memory boom) over a
broad spectrum of Roman phenomena.
In the
final two years (2012/2013), the emphasis is shifting more
toward publication. This includes collected papers from
some of the highly successful conferences sponsored by Memoria Romana and monographs resulting from the
work of its grantees and others. A limited number of
subventions is available.
We welcome
suggestions and comments. Please write to Prof. Galinsky
at galinsky@austin.utexas.edu.
Links: Max Planck Society, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, video clip of Max-Planck award.
--UPCOMING
EVENTS--
• March/April (2012) : Workshop for US dissertation
fellowship award recipients (UT Austin). Date TBA.
• April 18-20 (2013) : Conference at the J. Paul Getty
Museum, Malibu, CA -- Cultural Memories in
the Roman Empire
--PAST
EVENTS--
--NOTA BENE--
• Memoria
Romana has a group on Facebook: click here to view our page and request to
join.
• New Feature! We are working on documenting the use of Latin terms for memory by ancient Roman authors. Charts are currently available for Vergil's Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues, as well as for Livy's Ab urbe condita, Books 1-5.
MEMORIA ROMANA & THE CLASSICS JOB MARKET:
It was nice to have the following report from Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, one of our dissertation fellowship recipients... (click here to learn more)
MEMORIA ROMANA & THE DISSERTATION DEFENSE:
Congratulations to Lucy Jones, who successfully defended her dissertation, "Nostra Memoria: Social Memory in Republican Rome," on Jan. 27th, 2012. By British custom, the two examiners were not members of her committee, but two veritable powerhouses: John North and Christopher Smith, the latter currently being Director of the British School at Rome. Not only did they not require any corrections, but they both thought the dissertation "must be published as a book, as it substantially moves the debate forward and is beautifully written." And they are absolutely right! So on to that sequel!
CONFERENCE
ANNOUNCEMENT & CFP
--from two
Memoria Romana award recipients:
Maggie
Popkin and Susan Blevins will be chairing a session at
this year's annual U.S. meeting of the Theoretical
Archaeological Group (TAG) at the University of Buffalo,
May 17-20. The session is titled, Remembering Material Culture:
Archaeology and the Science of Memory.
A list of
approved sessions, the call for abstract submissions, and
more information can be found here.
The deadline for abstract submissions is March 1, 2012.