The University of Roehampton held an innovative two-day symposium, ‘The Future of Memory,’ at the end of October 2011, bringing together core members of the Memory Network to discuss their research and the possibilities of collaboration across the arts and sciences.

Professor Mark Currie delivering his keynote address

The symposium opened with a stimulating keynote paper by Professor Mark Currie on ‘Memory in the Future Tense: Perspectives from the Theory of Narrative.’ The Network spent time discussing crucial terms and debates in memory studies, interrogating concepts such as metaphors of memory, ethics, lies and forgetting, narrative, prosthetics and technology, and consciousness.

Network members also presented position papers on their own research on a wide range of subjects, including:

• the role of memory in food writing;
• a phenomenology of driving;
• the poetics of remembering and rereading;
• memory’s role in contemporary speculative realism;
• the evolutionary purposes of memory;
• Camillo’s Theatre of Memory as a humanising model for 21st Century art; and
• neurological structures of memory and space.

Dr Charles Fernyhough presented the second keynote paper, ‘The Sunny Never-Never: Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future’ to end the first day of the symposium.

Memory Panel: AS Byatt, Professor Patricia Waugh, Dr Charles Fernyhough and Dr Hugo Spiers

Network members spent the second day planning future activities and potential collaborative projects and publications. Further information about the outcomes of ‘The Future of Memory’ will be made available on this website. The symposium closed with a fascinating public lecture by A. S. Byatt, who spoke about her interest in the study of memory, and the way that her own practice of writing has been shaped by different structures of consciousness and memory. Professor Patricia Waugh, Dr Charles Fernyhough and Dr Hugo Spiers formed a panel to discuss these ideas with Byatt following her talk.

The ‘Future of Memory’ symposium and public lecture were generously funded by the Wellcome Trust, with support from the University of Roehampton, Durham University, and University College, London.

This event featured on Twitter: #futureofmemory      #memorynetwork