Ann Rigney (Dublin, 9 December 1957) is an Irish/Dutch cultural scholar and Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the transnational interaction between narrative and cultural memory and is authoritative in the field of Memory Studies.
Life
Rigney was born in Dublin and studied English and French at University College Dublin (BA 1978, MA 1980). In 1987 she gained her PhD at the University of Toronto in Comparative Literature . From 1988 to 2000 she was a lecturer in Literary Theory at the Comparative Literature programme, University of Utrecht; in 2000 she was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2003 she was appointed to the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht.[1]
Most of Rigney's research deals with the interactive dynamics between narrative (in literature and other media) and cultural memory.[2] Her early work dealt with narrative and imaginative strategies in history-writing and historical novels, with special attention to writers like Jules Michelet, Thomas Carlyle and Sir Walter Scott. She then turned to more general models of how the past is configured in the present-day imagination, and to the question how this imagination is expressed and communicated. Building on the earlier work of Hayden White, Pierre Nora and Aleida Assmann, Rigney's research focuses on the dynamics of cultural memory: how are memories expressed across different media and how do they move between different audiences, generations or nationalities?
Rigneys work has recently shifted from a nineteenth-century to a contemporary focus. Her work since 2000 has dealt with the poetics and function of public apologies[3] and with the cultural memory of political activism[4]
Among Rigney's theoretical concepts and models are
the principle of cultural scarcity,[5] meaning that cultural expressions have to compete for a limited reservoir of public attention and will try to pack a maximum of historical significance into as concise an expression as possible;
the fact that the canonicity of historical memory is commensurate with its likelihood to be expressed in different media;
these media involve, besides the textual or visual, also the tactile and the performative (tourism, memorabilia, re-enactment events);
these media all have their specific conventions and formal structures, which will in turn affect the nature of how memories are articulated and communicated.[6]
the mobility of memories along a twofold axis: intermedial as well as transnational,[7] and their wide impact on social practices.
the role of "embodied communities" (analogously to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities): physical gatherings of people (often festive) for commemorative or identity-affirming purposes.[8]
Rigney has evinced a wish to see Memory Studies move beyond its "traumatic paradigm", i.e. its tendency to concentrate on those collective memories that involve suffering and catastrophes.[9]
In her historiographical theory she resists a view of history centered on ideal-typical historians (as academics in history departments writing archive-based books on the social and political history of their own country); this, she argues, fails to do justice to the wide range of practices, academic and otherwise, through which societies take account of the past.[10]
Honours, awards and grants
Rigney's book Imperfect Histories was awarded the 2001 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Award by the American Conference on Romanticism.[11] She held visiting research fellowships at the University of Liège (1984-1985), Trinity College Dublin (1995), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (2009-2010),[12] the University of Konstanz (research group History and Memory, 2011),[13] and at the Lichtenberg Kolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), University of Göttingen (2012).[14]
She was one of the working group leaders in the COST action "In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe" (2012-2016). This led to the establishment of the Network in Transnational Memory Studies (NITMES), which won a €59,000 grant from NWO, the Netherlands national funding agency for scientific research, in 2015.
In 2018 she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced grant for the research project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (REACT).[15][16]
She is a founding member of the Memory Studies Association and sits on its advisory board; she also sits on the advisory board of the journal Memory Studies and of the Memory Studies book series (Palgrave Macmillan).
^History as Text: Narrative Theory and History" in The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, eds. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (New York: Sage Publications, 2013), 183-201
^"Can Apology End an Event? Bloody Sunday, 1972-2010", in Marek Tamm, ed. The Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 242-261
^"Differential Memorability and Transnational Activism: Bloody Sunday, 1887-2016", Australian Humanities Review, 59 (2016)
^"Plenitude, Scarcity and the Production of Cultural Memory", Journal of European Studies 35.1/2 (2005): 209-26
^"Cultural Memory Studies: Mediation, Narrative and the Aesthetic", in Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, eds. Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (London: Routledge, 2016), 65-7
^"Transnational Memory," Testimony Between History and Memory (Auschwitz Foundation International Quarterly) 120 (2015): 170-71. The transnational dimension is indebted to Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectionality
^"Embodied Communities: Commemorating Robert Burns, 1859", Representations 115.1 (2011): 71-101
^"Introduction", in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds.) Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 7-15; "Being an Improper Historian", in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow, eds., Manifestos for History (London: Routledge, 2007), 149-59; "When the Monograph is no Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age", History and Theory, 49.4 (2010): 100-117.
