A central purpose of academic research in the Arts and Humanities is to remember, for future generations, what is, was, or should be of import to our society in continuity – from the past, to the present, and for the future. For scholars, this process of remembering involves uncovering what has been forgotten (and interrogating why or how this came to be), analysing what has been remembered and in which form, and evaluating the forms in which knowledge and ideas are transferred from one generation to the next.

A community of scholars in the modern university works in diverse fields, with diverse sources, via diverse methodologies, and in the production of diverse means of recording its discoveries. This year’s AHRC interdisciplinary conference provides a space in which the various forms of our research, in both method and focus, can come into dialogue with one another, and an opportunity to contemplate and address the fear at the heart of our shared and respective project(s) of scholarship: forgetting.

The organising committee invites proposals for papers which speak to the themes of form and forgetting in specific or general ways, taking either or both as stimulus for reflection on the import and meaning of these concepts for our research, the reasons behind it, our means of conducting it, the forms our objects take, and the forms with and in which we work. We welcome papers which contribute to discussions pertaining to, inspired (or indeed at present hindered) – but not limited – by:

• the concepts of form and of forgetting themselves;
• the roles of form in literature and the creative and performing arts;
• artistic and academic constructions against forgetting;
• the dynamic between creation of form versus critical appraisal/experience of form;
• relations between the diverse forms of enquiry which constitute the Arts and Humanities;
• shifting of forms within and across the fields of the Arts and Humanities;
• voluntary or coercive forgetting; of culture, history, or experience, by, within, or in spite of societies and the desire to remember;
• the construction or destruction of individual and collective memory via personal or institutional acts of forgetting (and/or remembering).

The conference is structured so as to bring diverse disciplines and areas of research within the Arts and Humanities into contact with one another, so we welcome papers engaging with the conference theme in creative and innovative ways. Consider here an invitation to reflect on the forms which we create, and by which we record via our scholarship and research, that which we do not want to be forgotten.

***Submissions deadline is now closed. The organizing committee has already contacted successful applicants.