Memory Studies Bank

THE MEMORY STUDIES BANK

The Memory Studies Bank (MSB) is a collaborative bibliography and virtual repository for the growing community of memory scholars. It is an initiative of the Memory in the Disciplines project at Stony Brook University, founded by Daniel Levy and Andrew Newman.

The MSB responds to two trends:

The ongoing consolidation of a field of memory studies, evidenced by the existence of centers and specialized journals dedicated to the study of memory (see links), as well as the recent publication of a number of edited collections and special journal issues heralding the establishment of a field. This field is variously identified as social, cultural, and collective memory studies (these terms are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes indicate conceptual distinctions). Its participants include scholars from a variety disciplines, especially in the social sciences and humanities.
The ongoing debate as to whether memory studies is or should be "interdisciplinary" (involving contributions from scholars from various disciplines within a shared framework), "transdisciplinary" (involving a generative synthesis of disciplinary approaches), or merely "multidisciplinary" (characterized by several parallel, largely independent specialized conversations). This debate provides the opportunity to investigate the relations between disciplines.

The MSB bridges disciplinary divides between (and among) the social sciences and the humanities Accordingly, our initiative will allow scholars from disciplines as diverse as sociology, literature, history, psychology, philosophy, political sciences, performance studies and art history to engage in a sustained conversation - and, ideally, to enrich one anothers' understanding of memory. We are pleased that leading scholars representing a diverse array of disciplines have joined the MSB editorial board.

The engine of the MSB is the online bibliographic and networking tool Zotero, a free program developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

To learn more about Zotero, please visit www.zotero.org. We recommend their introductory video.
For instructions on how to join the MSB through Zotero, click here. For now, membership is passive, meaning that members are able to view items in the library but cannot add, delete, or alter them. Once the architecture is established (our target date is September 2011), all members can become active, wiki-style contributors. In the meantime, we welcome your suggestions.