Democratic Memories in Global Perspective

Laura Beck Varela is Associate Professor of History of Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid since 2013. She has studied in Porto Alegre, Seville and Frankfurt am Main. She has worked and published on the history of property law, gender history, book and censorship studies, and is interested in the role of democratic memory in legal education.

Ignacio Brescó de Luna is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and external researcher at the Aalborg University Centre for Cultural Psychology (Denmark), where he was postdoc researcher and Associate Professor until 2021. He visited Cambridge University (UK), University of Brasilia (Brazil), the Georg Eckert Institut (Germany) and Kyushu University (Japan) for his research, centering on collective memory, national identity, grief and the experience of memorial sites. He edited the books: The Road to Actualized Democracy (2018), Memory in the Wild (2020), Remembering as a Cultural Process (2019). In 2020 he received the Grífols Foundation bio-ethic grant.

Attila Dézsi is BA in Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology, with a minor on Gender Studies, and MA in Prehistoric Archaeology. They are pursuing a doctorate in Contemporary Archaeology, using the Free Republic of Wendland as a case study and employing a community approach to better understand the heritage of this protest site of the 1980’s anti-nuclear movement. As research assistant at the heritage office (Landesamt für Denkmalpflege), they research former sites of Nazi concentration camps and forced labor in Baden-Württemberg, and at the University of Tübingen they study the archaeological remains and heritage of a far-right utopian settlement by German antisemites in 19th century Paraguay.

Vangelis Karamanolakis is Associate Professor in Theory and History of Historiography at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). He is also President of the Historical Archive (NKUA) and President of the Society’s Board of Directors of the Contemporary Social History Archives. He has taught at the universities of Crete, Athens, Panteion (Greece). He has published several books and articles about theory of history, Greek historiography, memory studies, history of dictatorship (1967-1974), history of institutions, archival research and psychiatric institutions. His last book is about the destruction of the files of social convictions in Greece (2019).

Raphael Kupczik is representative of the Tübingen Students’ Union.

Pieter Lagrou teaches contemporary history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He has worked and published on the legacy of war, war crime trials and international justice, public history and the history of nationalism and national languages. He has studied and taught in Leuven, Yale, Firenze, Aix-en-Provence and Paris.

Dimitra Lampropoulou is Assistant Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of History and Archaeology. Her research and teaching interests concern social and cultural history, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, youth, work, welfare, voluntary action, social movements and memory. She has published books and articles on twentieth century Greek social history and oral history. She is a member of the Contemporary Social History Archives (Athens), the Association of Oral History in Greece, the Cultural and Intellectual History Society (Athens), the European Labour History Network and the research network “Who Cares in Europe?” Cost Action 18119.

Giovanna Leone is Full Professor of Social Psychology at Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy). She is full member of several national and international academic associations, including AIP (Italian Association of Psychology), EASP (European Association of Social Psychology), ISPP (International Society of Political Psychology) and Member of the Board of several national and international journals, including the Italian Journal of Community Psychology, the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, the Personality and Social Psychology specialty section of Frontiers in Psychology. She published more than 200 chapters, books, essays, and research articles. Her more recent research explores the role of historical consciousness in reconciliation processes. 

Laurent Licata is Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His current research interests are (1) the interplay between collective memories (or social representations of history), social identities and intergroup relation processes, with a focus on colonialism and collective victimhood, and 2) acculturation processes of people with immigrant background. He chaired the COST Action IS1205 « Social psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Union » (2012-2016). From 2016 to 2020, he was the Vice-rector in charge of academic policy, career development, and gender and diversity policies at Université libre de Bruxelles.

Cesar Lopez is Associate Professor in the Department of Basic Psychology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain). He earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at the same university (2012). He has been a visiting scholar at several universities in the United States (Harvard University, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston) and Europe (Institute of Education, London, and Erasmus University Rotterdam). His main research interests are collective memory and identity, narrative thinking, collective emotions, historical thinking, and history learning in schools and popular culture.

Irene Martín Cortés teaches Political Sciences at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She coordinates the research project “Polarization around historical memory in Spain: distribution and factors that affect its intensification” (2021-2024) and was coordinator at UAM of the Horizon Project H2020 “REPAST – Revisiting the Past, Anticipating the Future – Strengthening European Integration through the Analysis of Conflict Discourses” (2018-2021). She is currently Vicerrector of International Relations at the UAM. Her research interests are the political culture and participation in Spain and Greece, education for citizenship and how young people relate with politics.

Glaucia Peres da Silva is sociologist, specialized in globalization and cross-border processes. Her PhD in economic sociology focused on the formation of global markets, analyzing the case of the world music market. At the University of Tübingen, she is responsible for the development of the Global Awareness Education with focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The focus of her work is the inter- and transdisciplinary teaching on globalization, international networking and development of transfer projects.

Cristina Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, known for being among the first to publish on Hannah Arendt in Spanish. She has worked on the problem of contemporary evil and the Holocaust, authoring books including Cartografías del mal, Plaza y Valdés (2017) and Confrontando el mal, Siglo del Hombre (2018). In recent years, she has worked on evil from a gender perspective; mass violence, specifically sexual violence, against women in wars, collaborating with researchers from Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Germany and Croatia. Her latest publications are Violencias de género: Entre la guerra y la paz (2021) and La agenda de Mujer, paz y seguridad (2022).

Bacary Sarr is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. He is director of studies at the Higher Institute of Arts and Cultures (ISAC) at the same university. His book Imaginaire de l´insolite et problématique identitaire dans lettres belges francophones. Un nouveau fantastique? (2021, Liège University Press) was finalist for the Grand Prix d´Histoire de la Littérature of the Royal Academy of Belgian Language and Literature. He is now preparing the book An Archeology of Slavery Memory in Transatlantic Literature, that will appear in May 2024.

Floor van Alphen is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, after receiving a research fellowship through the Madrid Research Talent Attraction Programme in 2018. From 2012 to 2018 she investigated the appropriation of master narratives among high-school students in Argentina, with a Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) doctoral and postdoctoral scholarship. Currently, her cultural psychological research focuses on collective memory, addressing students’ cultural diversity and their manifold constructions of the past. Recently, she has published with Brady Wagoner in Memory Studies, and edited the book Reproducing, Rethinking, Resisting National Narratives (2022) with Ignacio Brescó de Luna.

Lukas Werther did his PhD and his Habilitation in Archaeology at Jena University. After a research stay at University College London, he worked as Visiting Professor at Tübingen University. Currently, he is Deputy Director of the Romano Germanic Institute within the German Archaeological Institute. He is a historical archaeologist with a focus on social inequality, historic environments and landscapes, including landscapes of terror and violence. Among his recent publications Nazi shale oil and forced labour. Interpreting surface finds from a shale oil plant of „Unternehmen Wüste“ (1944/45) in Wurttemberg, Germany. In: Beiträge zur Mittelalterarchäologie in Österreich. Beiheft (in press).