This project examines the role of cultural memory in LGBT activism through a comparative study of developments in Argentina, Italy, and the Netherlands. More information at https://rememberingactivism.eu/memorights-cultural-memory-in-lgbt-activism-for-rights/

• dr. Daniele Salerno

Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct) is funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (1 January 2019- 31 December 2023). It examples the role of cultural memory in protest movements: how are protest movements remembered across different media and how does that memory play into the emergence of later movements. More information can be found at www.rememberingactivism.eu.

La femme esclave: Afterlives of Slavery and Abolitionism in Women’s Rights Movements in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, 1832-1914

NWO-promoties in de geesteswetenschappen, 2016-2020 (€194,026).  Researcher: Sophie van den Elzen. Thesis defended 19 March 2021. Thesis title: Antislavery in the Transnational Movement for Women's Rights, 1832-1914: A Study of Memory Work. 

• Sophie van den Elzen MA

A Dutch Research Council funded Network to support the development of Transnational Memory Studies; more information at www.nitmes.nl

This project brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia. Dutch commentators have frequently claimed that the colonial past and especially the violence associated with it has been 'forgotten' in the Netherlands. Uncovering 'lost' photographs and other documents of violence has thereby become a recurring feature aimed at unmasking a hidden truth.

The author argues that, rather than absent, such images have been consistently present in the Dutch public sphere and have been widely available in print, on television and now on the internet. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance (now in open access) shows that between memory and forgetting there is a haunted zone from which pasts that do not fit the stories nations live by keep on emerging and submerging while retaining their disturbing presence.

• prof. dr. Frank van Vree