About Time, Memory and Representation

The post-war period has witnessed an increased preoccupation with the role and significance of historical knowledge, and the relation between the present, past, and future. During the last decades, through the linguistic and hermeneutic turn in philosophy, with critical cultural analysis, genealogy, feminist critique of science and established canons, conceptual analysis, and post-colonial “subaltern” questioning of culturally biased narratives, the very way in which history is studied, interpreted, and produced, has become a central academic concern. This academic concern also mirrors a more general growing preoccupation in Western culture with history, with politics of memory, with the cultural heritage, the construction and destruction of memorials.

The program explores this new common territory in three general sections organized along the key words: Time, Memory and Representation. The first section develops the conceptual historical critique of fundamental historical categories, including established chronologies, the second investigates how politics of memory and uses of history shape the relation to the past and explores the existential foundations for historical consciousness, and the third explores how different mediums (literature, film, language) shape and influence historical narratives and representations, and how this orients historical consciousness.