Memory Maps: Image, Place, and Story

Description

Deadline for Registration: 23 June 2008 

Programme and Registration
A provisional programme can be found by clicking on the link on the right hand side of this page.  Please use the “Booking Link” to book a place and pay online. The standard fee is £30 and the reduced student fee is £15.

 

 

Convenors:
Marina Warner  (Writer, University of Essex)
Amanda Hopkinson ( Literary Translator and Director, British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia)
 

Memory Maps: Image, Place & Story sets out to develop themes that were explored in Passionate Natures, a CRASSH conference convened last summer by Robert Macfarlane. If the emphasis then fell principally on wildness and the outdoors, the 2008 conference will focus more closely on cultural and social identities as they interact with narratives of place in memory. The question of memory work in the current increasingly popular literature of place will be a central concern. The project Memory Maps began in 2006 as a website created by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the University of Essex Creative Writing MA, and the British Centre for Literary Translation. It was established to explore our relationships to place. The conference in Cambridge is taking place in collaboration with Kettle's Yard Gallery, Cambridge, on 1-3 July.  It will explore :

1.The relationship between history and story in the work of such writers as W G Sebald, Iain Sinclair, and others who create fictive memoirs and use film, photography and other indexical evidence to blur the boundaries between event and invention.

2.The role of museums in creating interactive archives, and the effects of screen experience and computer delivery of knowledge on memory and consciousness.

3.The role of visual artists in defining the stories of the past, and the present activities of contemporary artists who map experience through multiple media – acoustic as well as visual, through walking, digging, foraging, archiving and collecting.

4.The questions raised by the ethical and political implications of such work: its connections to national folklore and the historic dangers of ethnic exclusivity on the one hand, and on the other, the engagement with ecological stewardship which a more developed sense of place and belonging can inspire.

5.Issues of translation between languages, cultures and societies in relation to internal displacement and diaspora on the one hand, and overseas exile and migration on the other.

Confirmed participants include:

Bernardine Evaristo (Writer)
Dan Fern (Artist, Royal College of Art)
Charles Fernyhough (Writer and psychologist, Durham)
Vesna Goldsworthy (Writer)
Joy Gregory (Artist and photographer)
Kevin Jackson (Writer) Grace Lau (Photographer)
Richard Mabey (Naturalist and Writer)
Robert Macfarlane (Writer, English Literature, University of Cambridge)
Hazel Marsh (School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of  East Anglia)
Adrian May (University of Essex, balladeer)
Ruth Padel (Writer)
Claire Preston (Literature, University of Cambridge)
Jules Pretty (Biological Sciences, University of Essex)
Susannah Radstone (Cultural Studies, University of East London)
Sahayl Saadi (Writer)
Jan-Melissa Schramm (Literature and Law, University of Cambridge)
Ilona Secacz (Composer)
Iain Sinclair (Writer)
Rebecca Solnit (Writer and Activist)
George Szirtes (Poet and Translator,  University of East Anglia)
Philip Terry (Poet and Translator, University of Essex)
Ken Worpole (Writer)
Patrick Wright (Writer, Nottingham Trent University)
Tamar Yoseloff  (Writer)

 

 

 

 

Please address any administrative enquiries to events@crassh.cam.ac.uk.

 

Information about accommodation and travel can be found at Information for Visitors and Visit Cambridge.