Profile

Ever since her PhD thesis, published as The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge UP, 1990), Ann has been fascinated by the intersections between narrative, collective identity, and competing interpretations of the past. She has published widely in the field of modern memory cultures, with projects both on the nineteenth century and on contemporary developments. She has written in particular on issues relating to mediation, transnationalism, and, most recently, the role of memory in activism. Her monographs include Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Cornell UP, 2001), which explored the role of fictionality in the writing of history, and The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford UP, 2012), which explored the long term reception of the writings of Walter Scott in material culture and political  discourses.

 In 2019 she was awarded an ERC avanced grant for a project entitled Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (REACT) which ran until 2024. It examines the ways in which protest movements since the late nineteenth century have been culturally remembered and how that memory feeds back into new mobilizations. ReAct forms the basis of her forthcoming monograph called Remembering Hope: The Cultural Afterlife of Protest, which is to appear with Oxford University Press in 2025. This collaborative project also led to The Visual Memory of Protest (co-edited with T. Smits, Amsterdam UP, 2023), Archiving Activism in the Digital Age (co-edited with D. Salerno, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2024), Remembering Contentious Lives (co-edited with D. Erbil and C. Vlessing, London: Palgrave Macmillan,  2025), and Memory and the Language of Contention (co-edited with S. Van den Elzen, Leiden: Brill, 2025).

Ann was educated at University College Dublin (BA, MA) and at the University of Toronto (PhD). Between 2003 and 2024 she held the chair of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University.  She is a member of the Royal Dutch Academic of Sciences (KNAW) and of the Academia Europea as well as an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2017 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Aarhus University and in 2021 she was recipient of the Belgian Francqui Chair at Antwerp University. She served as Head of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication in 2017-2019.  Together with Kiene Brillenburg, she is co-author of a widely-used introduction to literary studies called Het Leven van teksten (Amsterdam UP, 2006) this also appeared in a revised version in English as The Life of Texts: An Introduction to Literary Studies (Amsterdam UP, 2019). She is a founding member of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and since 2024 President-elect of the international Memory Studies Association. 

Recent Research Projects

Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe  (REACT), 2019-2023; ERC advanced grant.

Memorights: Cultural Memory in LGBT Activism. Marie-Curie Global Fellowship, 2019-2022. Researcher: Dr. Daniele Salerno

Monographs

The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford UP, 2012; paperback 2017). more.

Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Cornell UP, 2001). Winner Jean-Pierre Barricelli award. more.

The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge UP, 1990;2003). read more.  

Collections

Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited with Chiara de Cesari (de Gruyter, 2014).  more.

Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever, ed.with J. Leerssen (Palgrave, 2014).

Reconciliation and Memory: Critical Perspectives, edited with Nicole Immler and Damien Short (July 2012).  more.

Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, edited with Astrid Erll (de Gruyter, 2009). read more  

Talks

The Past is Another Story, Lecture for the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity: Regions of Memory Conference, University of Warsaw, March 2016. Available to watch here.

Transnational Memory: Bloody Sunday 1887-2014, Lecture 2 in the Methodologies of Memory: Distinguished Lecture Series, UCD Humanities Institute Dublin, February 2015. Available to listen to here.

BYU Radio Show Thinking Aloud Interview, BYU Utah, September 2014.Available to watch here.

Facing Waterloo: From Experience to Imagination, at the Varieties of Historical Experience Conference, University of Chicago, April 2014. Available to listen to here.

Memory and Mediation: Ideas and Challenges, Keynote at the ISTME Kick-off, Copenhagen, May 2013. Available here.