Astrid Erll is a renowned expert in the field of Memory Studies
The University of Copenhagen has awarded an honorary doctorate to Astrid Erll, Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Anna Lena Sandberg, associate professor of German studies at the University of Copenhagen and one of Erll’s two nominators, writes that “Astrid Erll has developed the research field of cultural memory and made it a dynamic way of examining the past as it manifests itself in monuments, media such as film and photography, fiction, family stories and museum exhibition practices.”
Erll’s research, Sandberg continues, is based on the idea that people “are not only surrounded by history or products of it, but active co-creators of memory. And collective memory can also be a political tool, as is currently seen in the Ukraine war.”
Astrid Erll is one of the leading and fundamental forces in the field of Memory Studies, which focuses on collective memory. How is the past narrated and remembered? How do we produce and transmit it? How do individual, local, national and transnational memories interact? And what ethical and political questions come with different memories? Around these questions emerged an international and multidisciplinary research field, not least thanks to the work of Astrid Erll, whose analytical concepts and publications are used by researchers all over the world.
Born in 1972, Erll studied German, English and Psychology at Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she completed her doctorate in 2002 with a thesis on memories of the First World War in English and German literature. She has been working at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2010. In 2011, she founded the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, an intertnational forum for a lively exchange on collective memory (https://www.memorystudies-frankfurt.com/). In 2016, she received an Opus Magnum from the Volkswagen Foundation for her research into the history of memory in Homer’s Odyssey.
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