Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, both professors at the University of Konstanz, Germany, will be the exhibitors of the international seminar Communicative and Cultural Memory, which will be held on May 15, at 7 pm, in the IEA'a Event Room. They will talk about the theory of memory that has been developed together from the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) on collective memory. The event will be held in English with simultaneous translation and broadcast live on the web.
Throughout their studies, Jan and Aleida make a distinction between two types of memory: a communicative one, related to memories passed from one generation to another in an informal and daily way, usually by oral tradition, and a cultural one, referring to the collective memories of the past that have a symbolic character and that last through texts, images, rites, monuments and other mnemonic supports.
The main aspects of the theory developed by them are synthesized in the research project "The Past in the Present: Dimensions and Dynamics of Cultural Memory", on which they have been working since 2011. The seminar is supported by the Department of Modern Languages of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) of USP.
Lecturers
Aleida Assmann is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Heidelberg and in Egyptology from the University of Tübingen. Her published papers cover fields such as Egyptology, English Literature and History of Literary Communication, but since the 1960's she has been working on memory theory. Her research focuses on cultural memory, with particular interest on the tensions between individual experiences and official memories of Germany's history in the post-World War II period.
Jan Assmann is Honorary Professor of Religious and Cultural Theory at the University of Konstanz, where he currently teaches, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Heidelberg, where he served until 2003. He holds a Dr. honoris causa title in Theology from the University of Münster. His publications cover the fields of Egyptology, focusing on interpretations of the origins of monotheism, Reception of Egypt in the European Tradition, History of Religion, Historical Anthropology and other topics. In recent years, he has been focusing on the dimension of cultural memory in a distant timeline, dating back more than 3000 years. From this, he seeks to understand the role of memory in disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
