“Memory, Temporality and Experience” 11-13 March
About the conference
The new history of experience seeks to comprehend the complex, multidimensional relationships between history and experience. As a burgeoning field of study, it is self-reflective and dynamic, with scholars constantly refining their approaches, and indeed reassessing the notion of experience itself. To develop the history of experience into a robust historical approach, scholars continually ask probing questions regarding sources, concepts, methods, and methodologies. In this vein, the organisers of the sixth annual HEX conference have chosen to interrogate the concepts of memory and temporality as modes of experience. This thematic focus aims to encourage scholars to reflect on experience beyond its external traces, and to mine the more elusive spheres of the internal, the cognitive, and the unconscious.
Programme
Monday, 11 March 2024
9.00–9.10 Welcome & Opening Words by Pirjo Markkola (HEX Director) (Auditorium K103) Introduction of the Digital Handbook of the History of Experience and the conference book table
9:10–10:10 Keynote: Bart Van Es: Imagining Childhood: History, Fiction, and Truth (Auditorium K103) (chair: Raisa Maria Toivo)
10:30–12:30 Parallel sessions 1
1a. Recovered Experiences and Contested Memories: Afterlives of activist Irish and Finnish women in the wake of revolution and civil war (Auditorium K103) (chair: Pirjo Markkola)
Fionnaula Walsh: “A witness to the slaughter”: An exploration of experience, memory, and trauma in women’s testimonies in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War
Mary McAuliffe: “I had thought we would have transformed the world”; Anger, disappointment and silencing, the treatment of political and militant women in the Irish Free State, 1922–1970
Caitriona Beaumont: Memories of a revolutionary grandmother: experience, activism and the challenges of family history in the wake of the Irish revolution
Tiina Lintunen: “If only I had been able to predict the future”: War experiences in the memories of women participating in the Finnish Civil War in 1918
1b. Northern Memory – Remembered, Experienced and Lived North (Auditorium K113) (chair: Tuomas Tepora)
Sonja Tanhua: Skolt Saamis historical consciousness through centuries – how community has remembered and defended its rights? (on Zoom)
Helena Ristaniemi: Entangling temporalities – Historical consciousness in the lives of young girls of Sámi Homeland
Jenni Räikkönen: “Fear in the Heart and Prayer on the Lips” – Oral history sources and the history of experience of midwife’s work in postwar Lapland
Kaisa Vehkalahti: A Hard Day’s Night – Memory, reconciliation and belonging in life writings depicting Northern Finnish countryside of 1950s
1c. Marginalised Voices (Room K109) (chair: Katariina Parhi)
Tove Ljuslinder: “A life without freedom, what is that?” Experiences of Swedish psychiatric care in the 1940s from inside the institutions
Freya Marshall Payne: Homelessness in women’s life histories: silences, gaps and experiential expertise
Stephanie Wright: Civil War memory, experiences of war disability, and Spain’s transition to democracy, 1989–2023
Maria Adamopoulou: “But this is trivial”: Greek Gastarbeiter valuing their life experience on the antipode of collective memory
14:00–16:00 Parallel sessions 2
2a. Recovering and Narrating Past Methodologies, Temporalities and Experiences (Auditorium K103) (chair: Rob Boddice)
Liisi Keedus: ‘Time outside History’: Temporalities of Experience of Franz Rosenzweig, Mircea Eliade, and Gabriel Marcel
Augusto Petter: Experiencing the End of the World: narrative time as a bond between existential temporality and historical times
Sara Honarmand-Ebrahimi: Toward a History of ‘Mental Montages’
2b. Mediaeval and Early Modern Temporal Reconstructions (Room K113) (chair: Karen McCluskey)
Margaretha Nordquist: Genealogy and memory: Constructions of self, family, and identity in late medieval and early modern women’s writings in Sweden
Thomas Devaney: The past as present: late mediaeval chivalry and the elision of time
Stefan Schröder: Remembered Experiences of the Holy City of Jerusalem in Late Medieval Pilgrimage Reports
Valentina Šoštarić: The Influence of Political (Un)Friendship on Shaping the Experience of Late Medieval Dubrovnik`s Diplomatic Practice
2c. Autoethnography (Room K109) (chair: Johanna Annola)
Lottie Hoare: Marjorie Hourd at the Kitchen Table: a lasting influence on my writing and teaching
Pia Koivunen: “I wanted to see the man with that mark on his forehead.” A historian, her childhood experiences and the power of memory
Annette Finley-Croswhite: Memory & Temporality Collide: A Historian’s Experience of Past Lives
Ilaria Scaglia & Valeria Vanesio: Archival Experiences Across Time and Space: An Edited Volume
16:15–17:30 Joint session 3 Q & A with Bart van Es on innovative approaches to writing the history of experiences, based on his award-winning creative non-fiction book, The Cut Out Girl. Café Toivo (Tampere University Main Building, 2nd Floor, Kalevantie 4)
(MCs: Louise Settle and Katariina Parhi)
17.30 Get-together in the evening at Café Toivo
(Tampere University Main Building, 2nd Floor, Kalevantie 4)
Tuesday, 12 March 2024
9:00–10:00 Keynote Ulla Savolainen: Time, Memory, and Hermeneutical Injustice: Mutable Memorability of Ingrian Finns’ Experiences in Finland (Auditorium K103) (chair: Ville Kivimäki)
10:30–12:30 Parallel sessions 4
4a. Music, Memory and Experience (Auditorium K103) (chair: Katariina Parhi)
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild: Navigating Temporality and Memory Through Music: Musicological Perspectives Towards a History of Experience
Karsten Lichau: Synchronizing Memory. Sounds, Emotions and Experience in the History of the Minute’s Silence
Fearghus Roulston: Epiphanic moments and temporal complexity in oral histories of the punk scene in Belfast
Peder Clark: Where were you in ’92? Drugs, raving and British cultural memory
4b. Time and Experience in Witchcraft Trials: Denmark and Finland (Room K113) (Chair: Riikka Miettinen)
Emilie Luther Valentin: “To the knowledge of the parish priest”: Pastoral statements in trials for witch-craft in 17th century Denmark
Louise Nyholm Kallestrup: Godly state, Memory and Experience in early modern Denmark
Tiina Miettinen: Bad, thoughtless words or malicious witchcraft? Rumors and accusations in the Häme region in 17th century Finland
Raisa Maria Toivo: Memory and circular life experience of a Finnish Witch (Christer Olofsson from 1670s to 1707)
4c. Children and Youth (Room K109) (chair: Antti Malinen)
Sharon Halevi: “But I can say nothing from memory”: Children, Family Reminiscing and the American Revolution
Susan Miller: “The Past Defines the Future”: Youth and the Experience of National Memory at Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial
Eve Colpus: Memory, temporality, experience, and age: a case-study of Telephonic Youth
14:00–16:00 Parallel sessions 5
5a. Nationalism and Political Narratives (Auditorium K103): (chair: Sami Suodenjoki)
Pierre-Marie Delpu: Experiences of Exemplarity: How to Turn Sacrificial Death into Political Martyrdom (Southern Europe, mid-19th century)
Ville Suuronen: Illiberal memories: Changing Historical Temporalities and Experiences in Hungarian History
Takehiro Okabe: Was it Possible to Share the Experience of Greater Finland? Soviet-Finnish Dialogue over the Kalevala and Greater Finland in the Early Cold War Years
Sinikka Selin and Tuomas Tepora: Great Expectations and Deep Distrust: Temporal Experiences in Post-Cold War Finland, 1989–1995
5b. Collective Memory and Memory Communities (Room K113) (chair: Tanja Vahtikari)
Sona Mikulova: The Past and Present Experience of the “Old Homeland” in the Individual and Collective Memories of Expelled Sudeten Germans
Marianne Notko & Antti Malinen: Memory community in the making: reflecting on Kuulluksi Forums
Riikka Taavetti & Tiina Männisto-Funk: Remembered, Experienced, Represented: Sweden Ferries and M/S Romantic TV Series
Jessica Bradley & Yinka Olusoga: Trans-spatial, trans-media flows: Family ethnographies of children’s creative exploration of identities in and out of digital space(s) in COVID times
5c. Memory in War and Crisis (Room K109) (chair: Ville Kivimäki)
Søren Werther Kjær Rasmussen: Social aid and collective experience amongst Danish WW2 resistance fighters
Christina Theodosiou: The temporal structure of remembrance: war experience, trauma, and expectations in interwar France
Allan Moore: Memory, Mass Graves and Memorialisation in Rwanda
Hannah Kaarina Yoken: Organising and Remembering END: Written Accounts of Anti-Nuclear Protest in Early 1980s Finland
5d. Temporalities in Suffering and Disabilities (Auditorium K110) (Chair: Daniel Blackie)
Mari Eyice: Shaping experiences of illness over time: the case of a prolific letter writer and her understanding of physical ailments in 17th century Stockholm
Päivi Räisänen-Schröder: Temporal dimensions of suffering in Reformation Germany
Lotta Vikström: Disability in Past Life Histories: Archival Facts and Literary Fiction from 19th-century Sweden
Marie Meier: Time to heal? Shifting temporalities in mental illness treatments and recoveries 1950–2020
19.15–23.00 Conference dinner at restaurant Tampella (Address: Kelloportinkatu 1)
Wednesday, 13 March 2024
9:00–10:00 Keynote Rebecca Clifford: Child survivors of the Holocaust: experience between individual and collective memories (Auditorium K103) (chair: Rob Boddice)
10:30–12:00 Parallel sessions 7
7a. Queer and Crip Temporalities (Auditorium K103) (chairs: Jenni Kuuliala)
Godelinde Perk: Singing in Crip Time: Sanctity, Disability, and Life Expectancy in Netherlandish Sister-Books
Kate Sotejeff-Wilson: Memory experienced in queer time: Wivi, Hanna, and the islanders
7b. Experiencing and Re-experiencing School (Room K113) (chair: Ella Viitaniemi)
Stine Grønbæk Jensen: Formation and memory formation at Danish elite boarding schools
Jane O’Brien: Irish Industrial Schools: Experience, Memory, Temporality
Isabelle Carter & Heather Ellis: School Meal Memories: Oral Histories and Communities of Experience in Twentieth Century Britain
7c. Experiencing through Language and Concepts (Room K109) (chair: Raisa Maria Toivo)
Jussi Backman: A Political Genealogy of Happiness
Peter Sorensen: Memories of Ancient Mesoamerica in two Aztec Cantares
Ofer Idels: The Hebrew Revival: Language, Experience and Memory
7d. Multigenerational Memory and Family (Room K110) (chair: Pirjo Markkola)
Miia Kuha: Like Livia to Augustus: The memory and experience of marriage in 17th-century funeral biographies on clergymen’s wives
Ann-Catrin Östman: Escaping serfdom – temporalities of family and social memories
Wiivi-Maria Jouttijärvi: Tears and laughter – Places and situations of remembrance of the Soviet era in Estonian families
13:30–15:00 Parallel sessions 8
8a. Accessing Pain, Remembering Pain: Pain, temporality and memory 1600–1900 (Auditorium K103) (chair: Jenni Kuuliala)
Eva Johanna Holmberg: Starving Times c. 1610–1620: Accessing Mediated Experiences of Suffering in the Early Jamestown and Bermuda Colonies
Soile Ylivuori: The Suffering of Edward Harwood: Eighteenth-Century Experiences of Medical Electricity
Clarice Säävälä: “I feel it sore but not painful”: Reconstructing Working-Class Pain Experiences in Victorian Egodocuments
8b. Remembering and Forgetting beyond Antithesis: Toward an apophatic turn in (hi)stories of national independence, colonial resistance, and multi-level catastrophe (Room K113) (chair: Karen Lauwers)
Karen Lauwers: Remembering the Mokrani Revolt of 1871 in Algerian petitions to the French parliament (1881–1910)
Iisa Aaltonen: The absent elements in the Finnish Independence Day celebrations of the 1920s
Nataliia Odnosum: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957): from individual disaster to universal apocalypse
8c. Researching Women and Socialism through the Lenses of Generation and Memory (Room K109) (chair: Hannah Kaarina Yoken)
Lotta Leiwo: Narrations of nature as intergenerational socialist education in local letters of women’s newspaper Toveritar
Hannah Parker: “So that we will be happy at the end of our days”: Generation, gender and remembering in public letter-writing by women in the Soviet Union, 1924–1941
Samira Saramo: “The Most Dangerous Radical in North America:” Forgetting and Remembering Sanna Kannasto
15:15–16:00 9. Final discussion 9 Bart van Es, Ulla Savolainen, Rebecca Clifford and Raisa Maria Toivo (chair: Tanja Vahtikari) (Auditorium K103)
Keynotes
Professor Bart van Es
English Literature, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University
Bart van Es is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and the author of several books on Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors. In 2014 he began to investigate the lives of his Dutch grandparents, who were active in the resistance during the German occupation and who sheltered a number of Jewish children. His resulting book, The Cut Out Girl, told the story of one of those children, Lien de Jong. In 2019 it won overall Costa Book of the Year Prize and the Biographers Club First Biography Prize. The book is now out in 17 languages. Van Es currently works in the field of Creative Non-Fiction. His most recent project, Colt Pixie, is a ‘documentary novel’ set in Shakespeare’s England, due out in January 2025.
Dr Ulla Savolainen
Folklore studies, Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki
Ulla Savolainen is a folklorist specializing in memory studies, oral history, and narrative research, with an interest in experiences and expressions related to (forced) migration, transnationality, and materiality. Savolainen’s current research project focuses on memories and experiences of Stalinist repression and displacement of Ingrian Finns. She has analyzed versatile mnemonic practices and media and explored the political and aesthetic values and ideologies related to memory in culture more broadly. Previously, Savolainen has researched the life writings of former Karelian child evacuees in Finland, and explored oral histories of internments of German and Hungarian citizens in Finland in 1944–1946. She has published her research in e.g. Memory Studies, Poetics Today, Narrative Inquiry, Oral History, and Journal of American Folklore, and she is the co-editor of e.g. The Legacies of Soviet Repression and Displacement: The Multiple and Mobile Lives of Memories (Routledge 2023, with S. Saramo) and Friction, Fragmentation, and Diversity: Localized Politics of European Memories (Amsterdam University Press 2022, with K. Salmi-Niklander et al.).
Professor Rebecca Clifford
Europen and Transnational History, University of Durham
Rebecca Clifford is Professor of European and Transnational History at the University of Durham in the UK. She is the author of two monographs on the Holocaust, Commemorating the Holocaust (Oxford) and Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust (Yale), and co-author of Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford). Survivors, her latest book, explores the postwar lives of a group of one hundred child Holocaust survivors, using archival documents and oral history to trace their journeys over seven decades. It was winner of the Yad Vashem Book Prize and the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards Scholarship Prize, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, and shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, among other accolades. Both the Telegraph (UK) and the Globe and Mail (Canada) named it a Book of the Year. Clifford is currently at work on a new book on the Lingfield children, a small group of child Holocaust survivors brought to Britain after the war, whose story intertwines with the postwar development of the field of child psychoanalysis.