ERC Advanced Grant for Ann Rigney Remembering Hope: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe

We congratulate Prof. Ann Rigney who received the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant. Mass demonstrations make headlines, but then seem to disappear. How are these demonstrations remembered when they are no longer news? That is the central question in the ERC project recently awarded to Prof. Ann Rigney. The ERC Advanced Grant (€2.5 million) is a five-year grant allocated to researchers whose ground-breaking work opens up new directions in their field.

The project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct) hypothesizes that protest has an afterlife in cultural memory in the form of the stories told about them. Knowledge of this cultural memory is needed for a full understanding of civil resistance.

Prof. Ann Rigney is professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, and is currently also Head of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication. She was trained at University College Dublin (MA hons) and the University of Toronto (PhD) in English, French, and Comparative Literature.

Her research explores the intersections between narrative, collective identity, and contestations of the past across a wide range of media and cultural practices.  She has played a leading role in the development of the field of cultural memory studies, as founder of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, as coordinator of NITMES, and as project leader in the EU-COST project In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe.

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