ABSTRACT
My work has been one long journey, going from discipline to discipline to establish connections (‘inter-ships’) between them, turning corners without cutting them and looking for ever-new ways of testing my ideas. As a result, I have encountered and temporarily journeyed with too many companions to count. The relationship between thinking about memory and companions has been particularly intense, manifold and inspirational. When, more than 15 years ago, I first began to work on memory, it was at the request of other people. Although I had written on memorialists such as Proust, memory had not been a concept that preoccupied me particularly. But when two professors at Dartmouth College, Leo Spitzer and Jonathan Crewe, invited me to work with them in a six-week long seminar, ‘Cultural Memory and the Present’, their title immediately made me think about each of its terms. These two colleagues and the other participants – among whom noted memory scholars such as Marianne Hirsch, Ernst van Alphen, and Susan Brison, to name but a few whose work has inspired me especially – became, thus, my first companions. The resulting publication, Acts of Memory, appeared in 1999. Another result of this initial and initiating experience was that I proposed the title ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’ (note the change from conjunction to preposition) for a book series I was asked to co-edit with philosopher Hent de Vries for Stanford University Press, within the framework of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) Hent and I had then-recently co-founded and of which I was the academic director and Hent the chair. 1
