Having grown up in the 1950s and 60s in the American west, I have a whimsical fondness for popular retro tv and oldies music (even though I was brought up a high culture snob); and, as a late modern historian of consumption, childhood, and technology, I fairly naturally gravitate to the topic of nostalgia and media. I am currently finishing a book probably to be called “Growing up with Cars” and will write another, “Fast Capitalism and Fast People” on the history and implications of the fast turnover of goods and media in the 20th century. Though I do mostly American topics, I have done British, French, and Australian history in my now old career of writing a dozen books or so. I’m Distinguished Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University and have been there since 1983.

Gary Cross is Distinguished Professor of Modern History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of a dozen historical books on childhood, consumption, technology, popular culture, and work, notably Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity; The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture; and An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America.

• contact: gsc2 (at) psu.edu

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gabriele de seta

I am fascinated by the mediation of memory and nostalgia largely as a reaction against the pervasive emphasis on futurity and presence that animates most scholarship on digital media. All media are shot through with temporalities: archives and interfaces inscribing and being inscribed with the threads of lived, remembered and imagined time articulated by their networked publics, audiences and users. Many of these temporalities are oriented towards the past, assembling and preserving personal and collective memories, or sharing and mobilizing countless varieties of nostalgia. I’ve repeatedly encountered the mediation of memories and nostalgias during my fieldwork in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and I’m particularly interested in exploring how different publics and communities articulate these temporalities in relation to the accelerating and momentous changes brought about by urbanization.

Gabriele de Seta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website http://paranom.asia. 

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sophie dufays

My interest in nostalgia emerged first from my doctoral research about the roles of the child character in Argentine fiction cinema of the post-dictatorship era (from 1983). By analyzing the aesthetic and interpretative models according to which the child represents a collective mourning related to Argentinean history, I distinguished between “nostalgic” and “melancholic” films, offering two different kinds of allegorical articulation between childhood and historical past. Beyond childhood stories, I find the difference between nostalgia and melancholy very thought-provoking, for example to study the distinctions between contemporary recuperations of melodrama and tragedy. In my current research about songs in Latin American films, the notion of nostalgia is also fundamental, since it sets out to reveal the practices, processes and forms of memory (especially, the nostalgic and the utopian ones) that these songs bring into play.

Sophie Dufays is a postdoctoral researcher in Latin American Studies at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). She has published to books (monographs) about the child’s figure in post-dictatorship Argentinian cinema (El niño en el cine argentino de la postdictadura (1983-2008). Alegoría y nostalgia and Infancia y melancolía en el cine argentino, de La ciénaga a La rabia) and her articles have been published in collective books and journals such as Hispanic Review, Bulletin Hispanique or Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. She has been an invited professor at Ghent University and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. As a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the FNRS, she focused on the persistence of melodrama as a model and an anti-model in contemporary Argentine and Mexican cinemas. Her current research project deals with the narrative, aesthetic and memory issues of popular song in Latin American cinemas.

• contact: sophie.dufays (at) uclouvain.be

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michael d. dwyer

I have been a nostalgic person for almost as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, I thought a lot about my own past, and thought about how my thought feelings about my past structured my present. Years later, in graduate school, I studied the history and culture of the American 1950s and found them to be, quite to my surprise, a time of uncertainty, fear, controversy and radical change. That was a surprise to me, I realized, because so much popular culture in circulation in the 1980s was designed to foster nostalgic feelings toward the 1950s. These practices of representing the past, as well as the culturally fostered feelings of nostalgia, I concluded, were neither neutral nor neutral—they were shaped, and shaped by, the political, cultural, and social conditions of their emergence. My work since I came to that conclusion has investigated the diverse, competing, and sometimes overlapping invocations of nostalgic affect, and how they influence American historical consciousness.

Michael D. Dwyer is an assistant professor of Media and Communication at Arcadia University. His research interests include the relationship between popular narratives and cultural memory, the interaction between popular music and film, fan cultures, and the politics of DIY arts and music. His writing has recently appeared in outlets like CultureBot, Alphaville,Flow, Negative Dunkalectics and In Media Res. His first book, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties, which explores the diverse and often competing uses of nostalgia for the 1950s in film and pop music from 1973-1988, was a was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press.

• contact: dwyerm (at) arcadia.edu

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ezgi elçi

I developed an interest in nostalgia during my Ph.D. dissertation. While I was designing my proposal, I realized that yearning for the past dominates contemporary politics. Particularly populist politicians exploit nostalgia to construct the moral dichotomy between “the people” and “the elites.” Thus, I decided to study the relationship between collective nostalgia and populist attitudes. I used a range of methods and data sources. Firstly, I analyzed how Turkish politicians instrumentalize populism and nostalgia by using insights generated from the automated content analysis. Secondly, I conducted a survey analysis that tests whether there is a positive association between collective nostalgia and populist attitudes. Finally, by using a survey experiment, I measured how nostalgic messages influence populist attitudes.

Ezgi Elçi is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoç). He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at Koç University, Turkey, with the dissertation titled “Politics of Nostalgia: Psychological Origins of Populism.” Previously, he was a visiting student researcher in the Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS) at the University of Georgia with a Fulbright grant. His primary research interest lies at the intersection of political behavior and political communication with an emphasis on the individual determinants of support for populism. His research interests also include survey experiments, content analysis, and migrants and minorities in Turkey.

• contact: eelci14 (at) ku.edu.tr
• Twitter: twitter.com/ezgielci35

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nermin elsherif

The wide spread nostalgic sentiment in the Arab world, especially after the defeat of the 2011 social movements, provoked me to question how do the present difficulties affect our perception of the past and how does the past function as a resource for cultural and social capital. My interest in following the counter narratives of the past, and exploring the hidden and invisible archives, led me to explore social media as exhibitions of online-personas, I started realising the relationship between the performance of social class online and subscribing to a specific narrative of the past.

Nermin Elsherif is PhD candidate in Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and material Culture (UvA), part of CHEurope, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) project. Her research “Technobiographies of an Imagined Past” investigates how the social life of the Arab speaking north African and East Mediterranean cities is remembered online, critically questioning the meaning of ‘remembering together’ in the age of social media. She focuses on the circulation of vintage photographs of the cities that are usually accompanied by a nostalgic mourning narrative of the once-had, now-lost middle-class modernity.

• contact: N.E.M.Elsherif AT uva.nl

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emmanuelle fantin

My interest in the ‘rewriting’ of the past through media naturally led me to the field of nostalgia. I am fascinated by the ‘ordinary’ uses of the past, the multiple expressions of memory, loss and temporalities in everyday life. I explore how nostalgia stands as a stereotypical and fictional representation used to build mnemonic bridges in the present time. More broadly, I try to understand how media shape and crystallize imaginaries of the past, I question the persuasive force of cultural beliefs in a twinkling past. Being a nostalgic person too, my researches also reflects a personal dynamics, trying to understand why the past seems so alluring …

Emmanuelle Fantin (born 1986) is Associate professor at CELSA Paris-Sorbonne and member of the Group of Interdisciplinary Researches in Information and Communication (GRIPIC, La Sorbonne University). Her researches focus on advertising, consumption and the commodification of the past as well as on the relationship between media, memory and history. Lately, she has been working on the role of nostalgia within the representations of migration.

• contact: emmanuelle.fantin (at) paris-sorbonne.fr

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sebastian felzmann

Born and raised in the 80’s, I’m highly fascinated by the whole Retrogaming scene, esp. the fans of the Commodore 64. To fully understand this community and the attraction of old videogames I’m using Media Nostalgia as a research tool to identify different modes of cultural usage and the interconnection between official gaming history and personal memory.

Sebastian Felzmann, M.A., studied German Literature and Journalism at the KIT and worked as a research assistant and project manager for third-party-funded projects and initiatives at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe. Together with Adam Rafinski and Jens M. Stober he initiated the HfG GameLab. As a freelancer and consultant, he supported several major clients in the field of game studies (GEELab Europe) and the economic power of games (City of Karlsruhe – Economic Development Department). Sebastian loves retro games and old gaming devices so much, that he had written a book about that subject, several scientific papers and even held various lectures about Media Nostalgia and Gaming History.

• contact: sf (at) colognegamelab.de

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talitha ferraz

My interest in nostalgia emerged from expansions of studies on cinema-going memories and movie theatres’ history that I have been performing in my academic career. In a post-doctorate research developed at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies of the Ghent University (CIMS-UGent), Belgium, I examined cases of cinema reopenings, with a special attention to the uses of cinema-goers’ memories by the revitalization projects. Since then, I have focused my investigations on the connections between memory, nostalgia, cinema-going experiences and affective communities, considering nostalgia as a creative and productive field of acts and expression dynamics. Within this context, I have been working on the notion of “activated nostalgia” in the project “Activating nostalgia: audience mobilizations, cinema-going memories and institutional strategies in the cases of Circuito Estação, Cine Vaz Lobo and Cine Belas”, carried out at Escola Superior de Propaganda & Marketing (ESPM), Brazil.

Talitha Ferraz (born 1982) is assistant professor at Escola Superior de Propaganda & Marketing (ESPM) and head of the Ways of Seeing Research Group (ESPM-CNPq). Simultaneously she serves as associate reseacher at the Coordenação Interdisciplinar de Estudos Contemporâneos (CIEC-UFRJ) and the Laboratório de Estudos de Memória Brasileira e Representação (LEMBRAR-ESPM). She holds a PhD in Communication & Culture from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil, with a doctoral internship at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. She also performed a postdoctoral research at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies of the Ghent University (CIMS-UGent), Belgium, between 2015 and 2016. Her investigations are focused on topics such as media and nostalgia, cinema-going memories and reopening of cinemas.

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sébastien fevry

My interest for nostalgia has first emerged while I was working on the sepia wave appearing in the popular French cinema, with films like The Chorus (Christophe Barratier, 2004) or Little Nicholas (Laurent Tirard, 2009). These films project the image of an ideal past in an French society more and more obsessed by its memory and I was dealing with the idea that the nostalgia of the sepia wave revealed an important change in the frameworks of the collective French memory. Currently, my research is more focused on nostalgia phenomena dealing with changes of social status. I’m particularly interested in the case of ‘class defector’ described by Richard Hoggart and Didier Eribon. In this perspective, I examine how the nostalgic mood can be linked with the social position of the filmmaker, and then appear in films through editing choices which lead to mix together high and low culture, intimate and collective history, as it occurs for instance in Of Time and the city (2008) by Terence Davies.

Professor at the School of Communication in the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL, Belgium) and coordinator of the GIRCAM research group, Sébastien Fevry works in the field of Memory Studies, focusing especially on cinema and image. He has recently co-edited a collection of articles on the images of the Apocalypse in cinema (2012). His latest book, La comédie cinématographique à l’épreuve de l’Histoire, has been published by L’Harmattan (2013). He is also the author of numerous articles in journals such as Image & Narrative, Espacestemps.net, Cinergie, Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, Cahiers Mémoire et Politique

• contact: sebastien.fevry (at) uclouvain.be

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kristen galvin

My interest in nostalgia studies was first concretized through teaching an undergraduate course on popular music and film, while writing my dissertation on the height of New York’s “Downtown Scene” between 1978-1983. I immediately became fascinated with how this cultural period has been revisited and represented in film, television, music, and art, and moved on to a broader exploration of how the 1980s has become a site of increasing nostalgic returns across culture and politics in the United States. My current book project explores what I call “hypernostalgia”—the increasing intensity, excess, and saturation of nostalgic expressions and products—to demonstrate how such cultural nostalgias and the fraught identity category of “Americanness” have become mutually constitutive in the 21^st century.

Dr. Kristen Galvin is the Assistant Director for Graduate Engagement and Lecturer in the Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere at the University of Florida. Examining post-1960s visual and material culture in the United States, her interdisciplinary scholarship explores intersections across film and media, popular music, performance, gender and sexuality, memory, contemporary art, and subcultural studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine, and has published work in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Art Journal Open, American Book Review, and in edited collections. She is currently writing a book entitled American Hypernostalgia.

• • contact: kgalvin (at) ufl.edu

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ross garner

My interest in mediated forms of nostalgia, primarily linked to television, grew out of my own fan attachments as I spent most of my teens (and beyond) watching programming from previous historical periods such as ‘classic’ Doctor Who, The Wombles and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (to name but a few). Extending these interests in to academia, I became intrigued with how and why certain programmes endure and become recontextualised across different industrial, media and historical contexts and how different programming forms, genres and brands use nostalgia as a strategy for issues including targeting and amalgamating audiences and fulfilling institutional requirements (such as public service remits). These are all areas that my research explores as, through taking nostalgia seriously and discussing the various encodings which media industries construct, my interest focuses on how institutional and historical contexts construct multiple forms of nostalgic discourse on television.

Ross Garner is a Lecturer in Television Studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. He received his PhD from Cardiff University and his Masters in Television Studies from the University of Bristol. His research interests include industrially-focused approaches to mediated nostalgia, cult television and mediated spaces and tourism.

• • • contact: GarnerRP1 (at) cardiff.ac.uk

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dion georgiou

After completing my PhD, I became particularly interested in how the popular culture of the past has been reimagined and reused in the wake of related transformations such as globalisation, digitisation and economic liberalisation, in order to explain and reframe recent history, redefine or reaffirm generic structures, deploy older cultural products for contemporary purposes, and create new rituals. This commenced with research into the phenomenon of contemporary nostalgia for the ‘Britpop’ music of the 1990s, which I am now in the process of writing a short book on, provisionally entitled Britpop Afterlives: Remembering, Replaying and Retelling the 1990s. I am also currently in the process of writing a number of articles and book chapters on popular culture and the uses of the past in Britain and the US, on topics including the representation of British labour, women’s and gay history in the films Made in Dagenham and Pride, and the 2009 campaign to get Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ to UK Christmas Number One. Furthermore, I am now editing (with Tobias Becker) a book, provisionally entitled Pop Nostalgia? Uses of the Past in Western Popular Culture.

Dion Georgiou is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London, and an Assistant Lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent. He previously completed his PhD in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. His broader research interests are in: Cities and suburbs; Temporality, lifecycles and the uses of the past; Cultural production, adaptation, dissemination, generification and reception; Organisational structures and cultures in the public, private and voluntary sectors; Domestic, international and global conflict.

• • • contact: DionGeorgiou(at)hotmail.co.uk

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ana paula goulart ribeiro

For the last twenty years I have been studying the relationship between media and memory. In the beginning, I investigated how the culture of memory – which makes the appeal to the past one of the great imperatives of our time – contaminates even the journalistic media, whose main focus would be the link with the present. In recent years, I have also dedicated myself to reflecting on nostalgia, more specifically through its configurations in audiovisual products of serial fiction. I believe that nostalgia says a lot about the ambiguous and contradictory ways in which we relate to our temporality today. The concept seems central to understanding the dynamics of culture and the ways in which we constitute our individual and collective identities.

Ana Paula Goulart Ribeiro is a professor at the School of Communications at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and director of the research group Media, Memory and Temporality (Memento) at the same university. She is the author of the book Press and History in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s (2006) and co-edited the collections Media and Memory (2007), History of Television in Brazil (2008), Mikhail Bakhtin: Language, Culture and Media (2010), Communications and History (2011), Entertainment, Happiness and Memory: Driving Forces of the Contemporary (2012), Television, History and Genres (2014), among others. She is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

• • • contact: goulartap(at)gmail.com

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berber hagedoorn

My research interests in the context of memory, history and nostalgia are studying the representation of past events, expressed via participatory media, multi-platform storytelling, practices of cultural memory and the re-use of archival footage, particularly for television, film and digital media. I specifically conduct research on (digitized) audiovisual material as cultural heritage (see for example EUscreen, promoting the use of television content to explore Europe’s diverse cultural history). In my dissertation Doing History, Creating Memory: Representing the Past in Documentary and Archive-Based Television Programmes within a Multi-Platform Landscape, I explored how televised history contributes to cultural memory and how television’s convergence with new media technologies has affected its role as a mediator of the past. Within this context, I study the changes and developments that the multi-media landscape undergoes on social-cultural, institutional and technological levels. Currently, I am researching the power of storytelling strategies of audiovisual media – from television and radio to social media – in representing (disruptive) media events, both in a European comparative context and using digital data research tools.

Berber Hagedoorn is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen Research Centre for Media and Journalism Studies. She is specialized in Media and Cultural Studies and in 2016-2017 works as a Researcher in Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, studying the impact of audio-visual representations of historical events and the power of narrativization via digital search processes and learning with AV. Her Digital Humanities experience includes (inter-)national projects on digitalized audio-visual heritage and cultural memory such as VideoActive and EUscreen, and the 2017-2018 CLARIAH Research Pilot (together with dr. Sabrina Sauer) “Narrativizing Disruption”, a project on how exploratory search can support media researchers to better interpret ‘disruptive’ media events as lucid narratives. Hagedoorn is the Vice-Chair of the ECREA Television Studies section, organizing cooperation for European research and education into television’s history and future as a multi-platform storytelling practice. She has published in amongst others Media and Communication, Continuum, Studies in Documentary Film, Rundfunk und Geschichte, Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis (Journal of Media History) and VIEW.

• • • contact: b.hagedoorn (at) rug.nl

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tim van der heijden

My interest in the intersections between nostalgia, media and memory is closely connected to my PhD research project on the cultural dynamics of home movies as a twentieth century memory practice. For more than a century, people have been documenting their family and everyday lives on film, video and digital media. The material carriers and technical equipment used for the recording, screening and saving of these family memories can be regarded as “technologies of memory”. While a connection between home movies and nostalgia usually relates to the images (and sounds) as mediated representations of the past, I am particularly interested in contemporary memory practices and cultures of (re)use which convey a certain longing for or remediation of past media technologies, both in terms of their materiality and aesthetics. In this double mnemonic process, which I have called “technostalgia”, media technologies not only construct or mediate memories but have also become the objects of memory themselves.

Tim van der Heijden is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He holds a RMA degree in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam (cum laude) and a BA in Cultural Studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam/University of Essex, UK. His research interests include media theory & history, cultural memory, visual culture, amateur film, technology and aesthetics. His doctoral research, which is part of the NWO-funded research project Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, investigates from a long-term historical perspective how changing technologies of memory production (film, video, and digital media) have shaped new memory practices in home moviemaking and screening. Next to his research activities, he is also a board member of the Dutch Foundation for Amateur Film.

• • • contact: timvanderheijden (at) gmail.com

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dennis henneböhl

My interest in nostalgia stems from a masters seminar on Brexit rhetoric and its wider cultural contexts. This initial engagement with nostalgia then developed into a PhD project dealing with the ubiquity of nostalgic narratives in contemporary British culture and society. The work situated in the discipline of British Cultural Studies – and also drawing on other adjacent fields such as literary studies, media studies and history – brings together theories on nostalgia with the concept of narratives. In doing so, I develop an approach that conceptualises nostalgia as a narrative and reads dominant forms of nostalgia as ‘master narratives’ in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense. More specifically, I posit the existence of what I call a ‘master narrative of nostalgia’ in contemporary British culture and society. One focus of my analysis lies on the ways politicians and the media perpetuate and instrumentalise this master narrative for various purposes, for instance within the context of Brexit or the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, I investigate how this nostalgic rhetoric interrelates with cultural products like films, TV series or literature. Of special significance is not only how popular culture can contribute to and support the contemporary master narrative of nostalgia but also challenge and subvert it.

Dennis Henneböhl is a PhD student in the field of British Cultural Studies and English literature at Paderborn University (Germany), where he was awarded a scholarship for his PhD thesis. The main focus of the project is on nostalgia in contemporary British culture and society. Among his other key research areas are the BrexLit genre, historical fiction, political rhetoric, Britain’s relationship with Europe, and British popular culture. He has presented at various national and international academic conferences as well as (co-)authored articles in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in edited collections.

• • • contact: dennis.henneboehl (at) uni-paderborn.de

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amy holdsworth

My interest in nostalgia emerged from a (continued) preoccupation with the forms and functions of repetition in popular culture and, specifically, within the experience of television. Theories of memory and nostalgia offered a framework through which to examine questions of both form and feeling in relation to television and I began to understand television (as visual medium and material object) as a privileged site of nostalgia. I published Television, Memory and Nostalgia (Palgrave) in 2011 but continue to be fascinated by the slipperiness of nostalgia as a mode of engagement with the past, present and future. At the moment I am particularly interested in thinking about nostalgia as a form of homesickness and the relationship this has to television as both a domestic medium but also as a transmitter of so many varied images of ‘home’. Related to this but drawing upon another area of research I am also working on the relationship between nostalgia, childhood and children’s culture.

Amy Holdsworth (born in 1979) is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow. She received her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2008 and a Masters in Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds in 2003.

• • • contact: Amy.Holdsworth (at) glasgow.ac.uk

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blake huggins

I have always been a nostalgic person, but my path to nostalgia studies as a scholarly pursuit took a circuitous course. It began, before I realized it, in my study of religion surrounding the themes of temporality, memory, and futurity. When my interests took me to philosophy and “theory” more broadly, I found a welcome set of tools to help articulate a long-standing suspicion — that received understandings of nostalgia not only neglect its full range of expression, but often occlude its value as a site for cultural production and socio-political contestation. My study of the history of nostalgia eventually corroborated this and my dissertation project sought to clarify and deepen the role nostalgia plays in cinema by analyzing “New Hollywood” directors and developing close readings of key figures in affect theory and continental philosophy.

Blake Huggins is a cultural studies scholar and a lecturer in philosophy and writing based in the northeastern U.S. He holds a Ph.D. from Boston University with specializations in philosophy and religion, and nurtures broad interdisciplinary interests rooted in the humanities and liberal arts. His research explores the tensions and intersections between memory, emotion, and temporality in conversation with critical theory, film and new media, affect studies, and philosophies of time.

• • • contact: blake.huggins (at) gmail(dot)com

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javier leñador

I have been considering myself a nostalgic for a long time now. After a walkabout around my former neighborhood in my late nineteens, I realized that nostalgia was the feeling that I enjoyed the most. Since then, I have been constantly searching for similar experiences from time to time, making an effort not to be hooked by longing too much.
Soon in my early twenties I could note that I was not the only one enjoying these hidden desires of bringing the past back, but It has not been until my late twenties and after researching other matters in Art History that I have not seen the research appealing of nostalgia.

Javier Leñador holds a degree in Business Management as well as Art History and a Masters in  Contemporary Art and Visual Culture by Reina Sofía Museum and Universities Autónoma and Complutense of Madrid. Since 2019, he is a PHD candidate at the University of Seville (under the supervision of Luis F. Martínez Montiel and María Jesús Godoy Álvarez), working on a project that considers nostalgic emotion as an aesthetic experience in its own right. They focus on pieces of contemporary art (mainly installations) in and out the museum as triggers for nostalgic and immersive experiences, placing them on the nowadays culture of yearning and revival.

• • • contact: jlenador (at) us.es

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ekaterina kalinina

My interest in nostalgia is grounded in individual and cultural experiences. Being born in Russia in the beginning of the 1980s and belonging to the so-called last generation of the Soviet children who matured during the first presidential terms of Vladimir Putin, I have been observing the development of Post-Soviet nostalgia. My curiosity to this phenomenon resulted in the completed PhD dissertation, called Mediated Post-Soviet Nostalgia (2014). Combining Raymon Williams’ concept of structure of feeling with theories of mediation and nostalgia, the book Mediated Post-Soviet Nostalgia examines the changes that occurred in the representations of the Soviet past in Russian culture from 1991 to 2012, covering a wide range of mediating arenas. Right now I continue my research on nostalgia, albeit with a slightly different focus. What fascinates me the most is agency of nostalgia, political nostalgia and gender nostalgia, as well as nostalgia theory and methodologies of research on nostalgia.

Ekaterina Kalinina (born 1983) earned MA degrees in Art History at the St Petersburg University and in European Studies at Uppsala University. Her PhD project in Media and Communication Studies “Mediated Post-Soviet Nostalgia” was carried out under the auspices of the Baltic and East European Graduate School (BEEGS) and the Research Area on Critical and Cultural Theory, Södertörn University. She has also been a visiting researcher at Copenhagen University and Aarhus University. Right now she is a research fellow at Swedish National Defense University and works with the questions of Russian patriotism, biopolitics, nostalgia and national identity. As the Vice-president of the Swedish organisation Nordkonst she also manages cultural projects and conducts research on cross-cultural artistic practices and intercultural communication.

• • • contact: ekaterina.kalinina@sh.se

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mirjam kappes

Even though the sentimental longing that we commonly associate with the term “nostalgia” is probably as old as humankind, I am particularly interested in the idea of nostalgia as a affective mnemonic practice that manifests itself in (or attaches itself to) today’s (digital) media artefacts, aesthetics, and technologies. With an academic background in film studies and art history, my research focuses on (audio-)visual media as means to retrieve and reappropriate the past, or, more precisely, our ideas of an imagined past. The complex relationship between an ever-accelerating digital media culture which permeates our everyday lives and an equally strong, almost omnipresent fascination with former times and places strikes me as a characteristic context for today’s nostalgic reminiscence(s). In my PhD project, I am trying to unravel common myths about (contemporary forms of) nostalgia, and I hope to be able to show how various modes of our affective engagement with the past become relevant to present realities.

Mirjam Kappes is a PhD student in media-cultural studies and scholarship holder at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne (Germany) where she is working on her current research project “Media-nostalgic Reminiscences in Today’s (Post-)Digital Era” (working title). She has studied Media & Communications, German Literature and Art History in Germany, Switzerland and the UK and received her master’s degree with distinction at the University of Hamburg/Germany in 2012. Prior to her graduate studies, Mirjam Kappes has worked at CineGraph, a Hamburg-based Institute for historical film research, as well as in journalism, public relations and communications. Her research interests include digital media and nostalgia, transmedia storytelling, visual discourses in urban space, and media aesthetics with focus on photography and film.

• • • contact: mirjam.kappes (at) uni-koeln.de

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slavka karakusheva

I am interested in the mediatization of nostalgia and the usage of emotions in constructing collective (national and ethnic) identities. I am trying to understand how personal memories are shared in social media and the ambiguous ways the past is interpreted and appropriated. I see these practices of sharing memories as a process of building a virtual archive. It is used as a social capital that reinforces a feeling of belonging to a group on the bases of identification with a common past.

Slavka Karakusheva is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. She holds a master degree in Cultural Anthropology and a bachelor of Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on the influence of social media on the processes of construction of ethnic and national identities. Slavka is an assistant editor of Seminar_BG – an online journal for cultural studies and was recently a TUBITAK visiting fellow at the Cultural Policy and Management Research Centre, Istanbul Bilgi University. Her research interests include ethnicity and nationalism studies, memory, migration, anthropology of media.

• • • contact: slavka.karakusheva (at) gmail.com

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alexei kazakov

Though my interest in nostalgia finds its origins (and its continuing impetus) in a desire to understand its contemporary cultural expressions of the kind considered in, for example, Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, my research has led me to an extended study of the history of the term from the famous dissertation of 1688 to the present day, with a focus on the particular discursive formation that has developed over the course of the last fifty-odd years. My dissertation has, broadly, two principal goals: to put the standard “history of nostalgia” back into question by examining a number of striking lacunae, and to integrate that re-examined history into the conceptual toolbox of the philosophy of history, notably that of Marcel Gauchet as well as the contemporary French inheritors of the German “conceptual history” (Begriffsgeschichte) tradition stemming from Reinhard Koselleck. Put simply, my central contention is that it is no coincidence that the term “nostalgia” only arises in modernity, for nostalgia is a distinctly modern affect which evolves in lockstep with the evolution of modernity itself.

Alexei Kazakov is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He obtained his master’s degree in Philosophy in 2018 following the defense of his thesis, “Exclusion and Legitimacy: A Critical Examination of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Concept of Practices Applied to Philosophy”. Beyond nostalgia, his interests lie in the broad category of “modernity”, which has led him to engage extensively with Anglo-American post-analytic social philosophy (Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, etc.), phenomenology, and the social sciences.

• • • contact: akaza070 (at) uottawa.ca

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emily keightley

My interest in nostalgia emerged from my doctoral research. My research involved spending time talking to women of different generations and social backgrounds about the ways in which they remember in their everyday lives. Nostalgia was a crucial part of their activity. While on the one hand it became apparent that this mode of relating to the past involved complex transactions between past, present and future in which relational temporal valuations were made and remade by women in creative ways, on the other hand the writing about nostalgia at that time (now over a decade ago) seriously undervalued the creative potential of this mode of relating to the past. In my research since then with my colleague Michael Pickering, we have been concerned with redressing what seems to us to be an underestimation of nostalgia and its complexities, and we have tried to make sense of the ways in which a mixture of loss, lack and longing are played out in nostalgic remembering. We have also developed the concept of retrotyping through which we have attempted to explore the ways in which nostalgia can be commodified and commercially appropriated and its creative potential stymied. We continue to be fascinated by this most routinely dismissed dimension of vernacular remembering.

Emily Keightley (born 1981) is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK. She received her PhD from Loughborough University in 2007 and has worked in the Department of Social Sciences since that time. She is also Associate Editor on the international journal Media, Culture and Society. Her main research interest is memory, time and its mediation in everyday life. She is particularly concerned with the role of media in the relationship between individual, social and cultural memory and the temporal structures of modernity.

• • • contact: E.Keightley (at) lboro.ac.uk

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colleen kennedy-karpat

My work on nostalgia considers how it emerges in juxtaposed texts and exchanges between cultures, with particular attention to how film adaptation frames and activates nostalgia. Like other media multiplicities – including remakes, spinoffs, and sequels – adaptation can be understood as both creative practice and commercial product. I’m interested in exploring each of these angles, along with audience reception, to gain perspective on the personal and social functions of mediated nostalgia.

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat teaches in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey and holds a PhD in French from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. Her writing has appeared in Adaptation, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Camera Obscura, and several edited anthologies, including The Films of Wes Anderson (Palgrave 2014), A Companion to the Biopic (Wiley 2019), Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television (Palgrave 2020), and her own collection Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (co-edited with Eric Sandberg, Palgrave 2017). Her monograph Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (Fairleigh Dickinson 2013), won the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award. Dr. Kennedy-Karpat’s most recent work includes multiple video essays (hosted at https://vimeo.com/cbkenkar) — including “Genre/Nostalgia/Quintana,” co-created by Wickham Flannagan, which examines transnational remaking as an expression of nostalgia – and a special issue of Adaptation on the topic of Adaptation and Nostalgia (December 2020). She studies national and transnational cinemas, media adaptations, stardom, and genre.

• • • contact: kenkar (at) bilkent.edu.tr

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gulbin kiranoglu

My interest on nostalgia emerged while studying the relationship between history, politics and space. I am particularly interested in the uses of nostalgia, especially in relation to the processes of urban modernization and everyday nationalism. For my PhD dissertation, I studied the urban nostalgia on Istanbul in popular culture of ’50s and ’60s Turkey; how this popular Istanbul nostalgia petrified a nationalized history of Istanbul.

She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in American Culture and Literature from Başkent University, Turkey where she also worked as a research assistant. She wrote her MA thesis on the cultural production concerning Generation X, the American youth of 1980s and 1990s. In 2016, she received her PhD degree in Communications from Ankara University, Turkey. In her doctoral dissertation, she studied the urban nostalgia of İstanbul in the mid-20th century. She is working as a lecturer at Kocaeli University and teaching courses such as “American Literature”, “Film and Literature”, and “Cultural Studies”. Her recent research interests include memory studies, popular culture and media history. She is also a member of European Network for Cinema and Media Studies and Association for Cultural Studies.

• • • contact: gulbin678 (at) gmail.com

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will kurlinkus

We make technology good by digging into the humanity of its users—I’ve often found that nostalgia is the perfect spade for this task. Much of my research seeks to democratize and humanize technological design, getting more people involved in the production of tech and improving the ways in which designers and their users communicate—from Facebook UX, to hospital forms, to digital writing classrooms. Despite misconceptions of technology as principally future-oriented, all citizens imagine good futures from what they esteem about good pasts. Thus, I ask questions like: Why are citizens of the 21st century so nostalgic for old technologies, traditions, and ways of knowing the world? How can technological innovators who are concerned with creating inclusive futures better engage traditional communities that are resistant to novelty and (because of this hesitancy) habitually left out of the design of the world? What can designers learn from the ways that technology users at the edges of progress use nostalgia to contest new designs and reshape their lives? And, in light of such defiance, what does the democratic design of technology pragmatically look like in our current nostalgia boom?

Will Kurlinkus is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Technical Writing and Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research examines the intersections of rhetoric, human-centered design, technical writing, digital culture, and nostalgia and has been included in journals including College English and Computers and Writing and essay collections like Rhetoric and Experience Architecture. His book Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology examines nostalgic cultures, from knitters who program software to vaccine-hesitant parents, to demonstrate how nostalgia might be harnessed to welcome communities into co-design that haven’t been well served by innovation in the past.

• • • contact: wkurlinkus[at]gmail.com

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zoë anne laks

What first sparked my scholarly interest in nostalgic media was my experience as a second-year film studies student watching The Saddest Music in the World, a 2003 film directed by Canadian experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin. At the time, I was struck by the film’s distinctive aesthetic quality. The film, as with virtually all of Maddin’s work, seems to evoke a sense of pastness beyond simply its historical reference to the age of silent-era and part-talkie cinema. I was charmed and intrigued by how this particularly spectral and hyper-artificial audiovisual quality seemed to stage – and even evoke in me – a sense of nostalgia. In my master’s thesis I interrogated how and why this is the case in order to propose a theory of nostalgia with applications to the plastic and digital arts alike.

Zoë Anne Laks completed her Master of Arts in Film Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2018. Her thesis, On Longing for Loss: A Theory of Cinematic Memory and an Aesthetics of Nostalgia, explored audiovisual nostalgic aesthetics through the lenses of melodrama and spectrality theory. She is interested in the intersection point between memory and media, including its affective, philosophical, and temporal dimensions. She is currently researching representations of non-human and object-oriented memories in film and new media.

• • • contact: zoe.anne.laks[at]gmail.com

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ryan lizardi

My interest in nostalgic media research began when I realized that I was the primary demographic target for so many of the media products being released that were aimed at engendering a longing for the past. Suddenly, everything I loved when I was young, from Transformers to DuckTales to countless remade films from the 1980s, was back in the cultural Zeitgeist as if it had never left. I began to think about what kind of relationship media companies wanted us to have with our own pasts, and the economic benefit of encouraging a kind of perpetual focus on whatever constellation of media texts we personally loved long ago. Turning my researcher eye towards something I personally feel susceptible to has been a common thread in my academic career, and working towards an understanding of what types of nostalgic longing media companies make available on a consistent basis fits right in.

Ryan Lizardi is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Ryan’s primary interest is examining the way media contributes to our understanding of collective and individual histories by presenting consumers with consist messages about our past and present culture. This throughline has informed projects throughout his academic career, such as his book Mediated Nostalgia as well as his published chapters on television remakes, apocalyptic time travel media, and zombie depictions throughout history. The projects he is currently working on include an analysis of Nintendo’s nostalgia-based commodification of characters, as well as an exploration of current modes of engaging the past through contemporary digital sharing means.

• • • contact: lizardr (at) sunyit.edu

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natalija majsova

My interest in nostalgia is closely related to my research into possible and (un)imaginable futures within the context of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian cinema. As a researcher, I first encountered nostalgia as a common attribute of contemporary interpretations of Soviet myths and of the futures they envisaged. At the same time, I found out that these contemporary reappropriations of a past’s futures also often manage to articulate apparently nostalgic aesthetics, formats, genres and tropes with new, previously unimaginable meanings. Therefore, I came to regard the intersections between nostalgic content, aesthetics, and media as potential generators of disruption within our horizons of expectations, and, following Jacques Rancière, the common distribution of the sensible.

Natalija Majsova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) and adjunct assistant professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana. At UCL, she is part of B-magic – an EOS-funded consortium project on the magic lantern and its cultural impact in Belgium (1830-1940). Her research focuses on the narratological, semiotic and iconographic specificities of lantern slides and their contribution to the formation of transnational popular-cultural iconographies of the world. Her first book, The constructor, aesthetics and the cosmonaut: outer space in contemporary Russian cinema (2001-2017), was published in Slovenian by University of Ljubljana/FSS Press in 2017. She is currently finishing her new monograph, Memorable futures: Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age, which is forthcoming with Lexington books in 2020.

• • • contact: natalija.majsova (at) uclouvain.be

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josé vicente martín martínez

I am interested as an artist in the relationships between memory and media, specially about how to visualize the fabric of its mechanism, why we remember and forget, and how this process constitutes our identity. The nostalgia for the lost home, the paradise of the childhood, the idealized past that will never come back are recurrent topics in my artwork. As researcher, I have explored the rhetoric of obsolete media following the methodology of media archaeology, tracing the framework where past and present are connected through re-activated old media. So, the obsolete media devices and their records –pictures, movies…­– would constitute a way to connect with the past, a form of nostalgia.

José Vicente Martín Martínez is a professor in Painting and a researcher at Miguel Hernández University (Spain). His artwork has been shown in several solo exhibitions in Spain, Germany, Italy, USA and Sweden, highlighting Memorial, Fish Market, Alicante (Spain), 2017 and The end of the biography, University of Umea, Sweden, 2018 as connected with nostalgia. His academic research focused on the concept of history, tradition and revival in modern art. During the last years, this topic has found in media archaeology a proper methodology to explore the connections between personal memory and technology.

• • • contact: jv.martin (at) umh.es

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irene martínez marín

With J.D Salinger´s books, contemplating Joseph Cornell´s boxes, watching a Wes Anderson film or listening to The Smiths. My interest for nostalgia emerged with the aesthetic experience I felt through the art I loved. I am interested in the study of nostalgia as an aesthetic emotion from a narrative account. C.S Lewis wrote that emotions ‘need not a map but a history’, especially nostalgia that has to do with past actions. I undertake this everyday emotion not only as an idealization of the past but as a complex sentiment that has to do with personal identity and biographical memories. My research explores the implications a narrative and visual analysis of ‘New Sincerity Cinema’ has in the aesthetic discussion about the relevance of nostalgia as an emotion accused of sentimentality. My aim is to defend that this quirky cinematographic movement characterized by a precious aesthetic and the representation of ordinary situations, embodies a reflective nostalgic sensibility committed to the portrayal of deep and sincere emotional feelings. Self-knowledge and moral evaluation are some of the aspects that I wish to relate to nostalgic experiences.

Irene Martínez Marín (born 1990) is a Philosophy doctoral candidate at the University of Murcia (Spain). She holds a Masters in History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture from the Autonomous University of Madrid and MNCARS (2014). Her doctoral dissertation “Nostalgia as an aesthetic emotion and its representation in New Sincerity Cinema” focuses on the work of a group of contemporary independent filmmakers (Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola) in order to analyze how nostalgia colors this cinematographic movement. Her research interests include philosophy of emotions, cognitive film theory, the paradox of fiction, and the relationship between aesthetic and ethic value in narrative artworks.

• • • contact: ire.martinezmarin (at) gmail.com

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antonella mascio

My interest in nostalgia includes several social and cultural aspects. Nostalgia indeed concerns an emotional state linked to personal situations, as well as to social groups sharing memories and emotions related to the past. In the field of media productions, we see that nostalgia is presented through different shapes and forms, producing emotional effects in the audience. A question that needs to be investigated inside the field of Media Studies.
My study of nostalgia is mainly related to TV series, which have recently become the leading products of medial proposals. They use to include stories located in the past or based on the loss of something or someone. Studying TV series as cultural texts, we see that nostalgia is used as a narrative strategy that works both as a relevant element of television complexity and as an opportunity to attract different kinds of audiences. Sharing nostalgia feelings, in fact, means belonging to specific groups, which are distributed according to age or to cultural affiliation.
In addition to a textual analysis of TV series, considering today context of cultural convergence, my study also includes a section dedicated to audiences’ activities and to nostalgia effect, especially in online spaces.

Antonella Mascio is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communication Processes and she teaches in the Communication and Fashion Programmes at University of Bologna. In recent years she focused her researches on online social relations and on relationships between the Internet and Tv Drama. Her publications include Virtuali Comunità (2008), Fashion Games (2012 ed.) and many articles dedicated to Tv Series. Her current research examines Tv Series and online audiences.

Contact: antonella.mascio(at)unibo.it

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manuel menke

As a media and communication scholar rooted in social sciences, I am interested in the relationship of media and nostalgia on a societal level. How does media change affect nostalgia in contemporary societies, what is its purpose for individuals, communities, and the society at large? How are media, memory and communication involved? I wrote my dissertation about the relationship of media, nostalgia and digital publics to answer these questions especially under the assumption that nostalgia is a reaction to change and the subsequent feelings of loss evoked in people. Media are included in this approach not only as technologies of mediation but in their interrelation with culture and society and their potential as agents of change. Hence, possibilities and limits of communication emerging through media change contribute to different nostalgic mnemonic practices and influence who is included in the mediated negotiation of the past. In my understanding, it is important to contextualize the nexus of media and nostalgia in past and contemporary societies and go beyond the social sciences perspective by integrating established philosophical and historical conceptualizations of nostalgia.

Manuel Menke is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. From 2018 to 2020, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Communication (IfKW) at LMU Munich, Germany. He did his PhD and worked as a postdoc from 2011 to 2018 at the University of Augsburg in Germany after he studied communication and politics at the German Universities of Mainz and Bamberg. His research interests comprise (theories of) social and media change, media and nostalgia, memory and narratives in media and public sphere(s), and journalism research. He is co-founder of the International Media and Nostalgia Network (IMNN) and has published several articles, chapters, and a dissertation about media and nostalgia.

• • • contact: manuel.menke (at) hum.ku.dk

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dario miccoli

My academic interest in nostalgia began as a way to cope with, and perhaps understand, the nostalgia I was feeling (and, often, I still feel) for places, times and most of all people lost. My current project deals with nostalgia as a foundational trope of the contemporary Jewish literary imaginary, with particular reference to the Jews of the Arab world and their descendants. I am interested in nostalgia insofar as it emerges in literary and autobiographical writings, but also in other medias like cinema and the Internet. Even though I doubt that this project will cure my own nostalgia, at least I hope it will offer a contribution of some sort to the cultural and historical understanding of this feeling.

I am Lecturer in Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a Member of the Board of SeSaMO – Italian Society of Middle East Studies. I hold a PhD in History from the European University Institute, Fiesole and before joining Ca’ Foscari I was postdoctoral fellow at IREMAM, Aix-Marseille Université and at the French Research Centre of Jerusalem. I have published two books – Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s (2015) and La letteratura israeliana mizrahi (2016) – and articles dedicated to the cultural history and memory of the Jews of Egypt and North Africa, and to Israeli literature. I am the editor of Memory and Ethnicity: Ethnic Museums in Israel and the Diaspora (with Emanuela Trevisan Semi and Tudor Parfitt, 2013) and Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature: A Diaspora (2017).

• • • contact: dario.miccoli(at)unive(dot)it

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mani mehrvarz

I have been working on several films and media projects with a focus on memory and nostalgia, including “Wistful Affection for the Past” (2013), “Private Nostalgia” (2014), and “Strata of Memory” (2016-19). Currently, I am more interested in the unstable processes in technologies of recording memory (both analog and digital) that can give fourth to nostalgia in media through a materialist perspective. In my film career, oral history and revisiting individuals’ experiences of the past play a significant role.

Mani Mehrvarz is an award-winning non-fiction filmmaker, media artist, curator, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, where he also teaches courses in documentary, video art and media theory. His media installations and documentary films have received recognition around the world in solo and group shows, juried festivals and screening programs since 2004 including Japan Media Art Festival, PERL Media Festival in Norway, Short Waves Festival in Poland, FIVA Video Art Festival, VIDEOGRAMA Video Art Festival, Chile Bienal de Artes Mediales, and Buffalo International Film Festival. Mehrvarz is the founder and director of Buffalo Documentary Project (a collaborative project to unfold the untold stories of Buffalo and WNY), and the co-founder and curator of Media-As-Things (a collective with a focus on media art practice-research). Of his publications in the context of nostalgia is: “Media-as-Things: A Nonhistorical Nostalgia Through Failure” (2019), co-authored with Maryam Muliaee, in Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia in Media (Ed. Ryan Lizardi). His project “Private Nostalgia” (2014) has been featured and reviewed in various scholarly publications including Ewa Wojtowicz’s book, Art In Post-Media Culture (2016), as a creative example of data base cinema along with several other contemporary projects such as Lev Manovich’s Soft Cinema.

Website: http://manimehrvarz.com/

• • • contact: manimehr[at]buffalo.edu

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maarten michielse

I am particularly interested in looking at the ways in which forms of ‘digital nostalgia’ are currently developing next to, and in relation to, instances of analogue nostalgia. How does digital nostalgia differ from analogue nostalgia? And what kind of particular characteristics of older digital formats, devices, and cultural practices are idealised, foregrounded, re-introduced and re-appreciated in today’s society? While my research mostly focuses on (popular) music and audio technologies, I am also interested in (digital) media in a broader sense, including social media, games, and film.

Maarten Michielse is a lecturer critical digital media practice at Lancaster University, UK. He is also currently the director of the Media and Cultural Studies programmes at Lancaster University. Michielse has published on digital remix and mashup practices in journals such as the International Journal of Community Music, IASPM Journal, and M/C Journal. In his research, Michielse makes use of a (virtual) ethnographic approach to study the way in which everyday users appropriate, remix, and redistribute cultural works in a digital era.

Contact: m.michielse(at)lancaster.ac.uk

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christian hviid mortensen

I am interested in the dynamics of media and nostalgia as nostalgia have proven to be the immediate affective response of many people when confronted with media technology and content from the recent past. Rather than viewing the nostalgic attitude to the past as something to be overcome, I view nostalgia as an affective investment in the past that can be built upon to facilitate further reflection and a more nuanced understanding of the past.

Christian Hviid Mortensen is a media historian and curator of media heritage at the Media Museum in Odense, Denmark. His research interest sits at the intersection of media studies, popular culture, memory studies, museology and the history of technology. He has curated diverse exhibitions on videogames, comic books, radio sound and reality TV. Christian sits on the editorial board of MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research.

• • • contact: CHRHM(at)odense.dk

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maryam muliaee

I’m interested in nostalgia in relation to media materiality, and particularly within experimental film, analog video, and xerography practice. I’ve been growing a fascination in the concept of nostalgia in its possible connection to failure in media, material image, degeneration, absence and erasure. My work uses various experimental recycling methods to rework audio, photographic and filmic materials where themes such as nostalgia and affect are inevitably met.

Maryam Muliaee is a media artist-researcher living and working in Buffalo, New York. Her work is multidisciplinary, ranging from video/sound installations to experimental animations and locative media. Her current project/research explores how media can create urban imaginaries through embodied methods and feminist tactics. With a focus on the theme of media materiality, Maryam’s recent work conjugates nostalgia uniquely in the context of haptic image and archival art practice. Her “Recycled Series” project (2014-ongoing) that takes on the themes of degeneration, erasure and nostalgia was exhibited in “Make.Media.Matter” (2018) at UB Art Gallery, and “Media-As-Things” (2019) at El Museo Gallery in Buffalo, NY. In the context of media and nostalgia, she recently published a book chapter: “Media-as-Things: A Nonhistorical Nostalgia Through Failure” (2019), co-authored with Mani Mehrvarz, in Ryan Lizardi’s edited volume, Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia in Media. She is the recipient of the grant award 2019-2020 in UB Gender Institute Dissertation Fellowship for her doctoral project “Feminist Media Archaeologies as Counter-mapping”. Maryam currently serves as the editor for MAST (NeMLA’s new journal of Media Art, Study and Theory).

Website: http://maryammuliaee.com/

• • • contact: mmuliaee[at]buffalo.edu

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jenny naish

What is home to you? What does it mean? Is it a place, person a thought or a thing? Is it acquired through journeys? Through language? Bricks and mortar? What is its relationship with notions of identity and nationality? These were the initial questions that drew me to nostalgia studies. Since embarking on an MA in 2016, and eventually a PhD to develop the ideas that had subsequently taken shape, I have directed my attention specifically to the notion of nostalgic space; its aestheticisation and substance as an ahistorical ‘other place’, its role within cultural and individual spheres, and its socio-political or cultural contexts.

Jenny Naish is a Ph.D. student in Literature in the Department of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom). She holds a master degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought from the University of Sussex and a bachelor degree in Drama and English Literature from the University of Kent (UK). She studies portrayals of female quixotism across time, the aestheticisation of nostalgic space, and how these two lines of enquiry intersect. Her research crosses various disciplines, including literature, history, folklore, gender and philosophy.

• contact: jn291 (at) sussex.ac.uk

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nicola sayers

Linda Hutcheon (2000), writing about nostalgia, felt the need to confess: ‘I am utterly un-nostalgic […] a personality fault to which I must admit’. By contrast, I confess: I am a nostalgic, and I am a daydreamer. Intellectually, it was via an original fascination with utopia that I stumbled upon nostalgia. If utopia was relatively absent in the twenty-first century, as so many of the theorists I was drawn to claimed, nostalgia seemed to be everywhere. More than just a personal predilection, then, I started to engage with nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon. Were my own leanings in fact connected with ‘little daydreams’ (Ernst Bloch) being harboured by film enthusiasts, TV obsessives, readers and bloggers far and wide? Millions of tiny lights flickering to a tune that was just slightly off-kilter, not entirely contemporary with the lived moment? I also wondered how this nostalgic longing that seemed to permeate American popular culture connected with the bigger question that consumed me: where had utopia gone? Was it stuck somewhere in the past, where it could be re-lived only in endless media repetitions? And if so, what did that mean for the future? It was out of an attempt to make sense of some of these questions that my PhD emerged, in which I draw on Ernst Bloch to look anew at what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘nostalgia mode’ in contemporary American literature and culture.

Dr Nicola Sayers recently completed her PhD at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is now working on her first book, The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Literature and Culture. More broadly, her research is concerned with bringing the work of various Frankfurt School theorists to bear in our understanding of contemporary literature and culture, and is focused especially on questions of nostalgia, memory, hope and utopia.

contact: nicola.sayers(at)gmail.com

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bjørn schiermer

Besides more theoretical sociological interests, I am ardently interested in contemporary Western retro-culture and its sociological and cultural ramifications and consequences. It is my thesis that nostalgia plays an important part among other salient sensibilities in a contemporary popular culture which seems compulsively occupied with its own recent past. In recent work I have investigated into how nostalgia mixes with ironic or genuine appreciations of past cultural forms.
I am especially attentive to the collective side to nostalgic phenomena. This should be understood in a very concrete sense: Cultivating nostalgic sentiment generates collective bonds; the relation to the nostalgic object is (almost) always animated by collective ritual. I have analyzed these social and ritual aspects with a special regard to the question of mediation: Nostalgic objects may work as collective mediators holding together intimate and interactionist relations or more extended and anonymous collectives.

Bjørn Schiermer currently holds a position as Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University. He gained his PhD from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology in 2010. He has published numerous papers in the area of theoretical sociology and sociology of culture. For recent publications centered wholly or partly on the phenomenon of nostalgia.

• contact: bjornsa(at)gmail(dot)com

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dominik schrey

personal statement coming soon

Dominik Schrey is a research associate at the German Department of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In the last years, he also held teaching assignments at the University of Usti nad Labem (CZ) and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. For the fall term 2011, he was a Visiting Fellow in the Harvard University PhD Program in Film and Visual Studies, supported by a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service. Currently, he is working on finishing his PhD thesis on “Analog Nostalgia in Digital Media Culture” (supervised by Prof. Andreas Böhn, KIT, and Prof. Jens Schröter, Univesität Bonn). His research interests include media theory, media history and the wider field of memory studies.

• contact: dominik.schrey (at) kit.edu

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constantine sedikides

more details coming soon

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ola siebert

The topic of nostalgia and technologies has always been present in my life. I have been interested by analog photography and why people decide to go back to film photography and to the materiality of objects. At the same time, I’m a compulsive science-fiction reader, who was raised with books of, among others, Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Aasimov and Philip K. Dick, and science-fiction movies (such as Star Wars, Marvel universe, etc.). The look towards the future (of technologies and societies) is somewhat mixed with the feeling of nostalgia. While moving continents in 2019, from Europe to North America (Quebec), I realized that Montréal, where I currently live and work, is, at the same time, the site of fast-pace technology progress and a complete nostalgic vision of nearly European city, with its particular history. This move pushed me towards studying and researching on nostalgia and technology, technology and media and media and nostalgia.

Ola Siebert is a student-member of UQAM-CELAT. She obtained a Master degree in European Studies (history and cultures of Europe) from Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Her research focuses on alternative (future) history of artificial intelligence and nostalgia, intersection between feminity and masculinity, culture and technology. She is also interested in online nostalgic expressions and post-soviet nostalgia in Poland.

• contact: olasiebert (at) outlook.com

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sabine sielke

My interest in nostalgia emerged from my work on issues of seriality and on concepts and cultural practices of memory at the crossroads of cultural studies and the cognitive sciences. Phenomena of nostalgia and processes of memory share a dimension of seriality; that is, both work by ways of repetition and difference. Yet how can we distinguish nostalgia from other modes of memory? This is one of the questions I currently pursue as a member and spokesperson of an interdisciplinary group of scholars collaborating at the Zentrum für Kulturwissenschaft|Cultural Studies, University of Bonn (www.nostalgie-uni-bonn.de). Our research project “Nostalgia: Time-Spaces, Affects, Commodity Culture” aims to account for the history of nostalgia’s shifting forms and functions, to define a clear conceptual framework for the term, and to clarify its relation to ‘retro.’ How do time-spaces we deem ‘nostalgic’ emerge? How do forms and functions of nostalgia transform over time? How do retro aesthetics shape affects? And what role do media of reproduction play for the affinity of nostalgia and consumption? Nostalgic practices, we hold, make analytical inroads into fundamental processes of modernity and into a resistance against modernization – an argument laid out in our forthcoming essay collection Nostalgia: Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures (ed. Sielke 2017).

Sabine Sielke is Professor and Chair of North American Literature and Culture, Director of the North American Studies Program and the German-Canadian Centre, as well as spokesperson of the “Zentrum für Kulturwissenschaft/Cultural Studies” at the University of Bonn. Her publications include Fashioning the Female Subject (1997) and Reading Rape (2002), 120 essays and book chapters, and 18 (co-)edited volumes, among them Knowledge Landscapes North America (2016) and American Studies Today: New Research Agendas (2014). Currently, she is working on projects on nostalgia, ecologies of knowledge, and issues at the crossroads of cultural studies and the sciences.

• contact: ssielke (at) nap-uni-bonn.de
  

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richy srirachanikorn

Pain and connection has always been crucial to me. Fundamentally, my research looks at the ways in which individuals cope with the clash between their lives of the physical world and the ones lived digitally. Like nostalgia on the past that was and could have been (Boym 2001), this is not to say that there is a clear divide between what is ‘real life’ and what is not. Rather, I look at how socially isolated and withdrawing people cope with their living situations through the activities, relationships, and constructions they make in the digital world, and the divisions this social pain has caused internally. If people can define situations as real and it be real in its consequences, then the objects and digital lives from a player’s creative nostalgia should signal a loss that is both defined and real. Digital nostalgia is a key avenue to understand this experience. The narratives and connections surrounding these objects may provide a legitimate overview of a nostalgic’s desires and their social pain, following Katharina Niemeyer’s perspective-focused process of digital nostalgizing. In time, I hope to be able to develop a cohesive application of nostalgia, social pain, and people’s digital expression for mental health professionals and virtual world creators to create accommodating digital spaces not just for the socially isolated, but for all of us who for many moments during the day, retreat away to rely on the fulfillment of our digital lives. Simply, there can be productivity within possibility.

Richy Srirachanikorn is a MA Sociology student at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He earned his BA in Sociology from the University of British Columbia focusing on classical sociological theories of the self and what digital living means for this concept. His directed studies amounted to an original theory of the “Digitalized Other” applied to online classrooms during COVID-19. At Concordia University, he is furthering this research into a Master’s thesis on play, nostalgia, and loneliness, focusing on the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO) Club Penguin, and how nostalgia has maintained the community and its players despite being officially shut down since 2017. Currently, he is setting up a student-led symposium on digital nostalgia “LOSTAGAIN” open for faculty, students, artists, and professionals to present or participate for February 4th, 2023 at Concordia University.

• contact: srirachanikorn (at) gmail.com
• Website: The Digitalized Other

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tobias steiner
Although my primary research focus is more on the side of Television as a medium of (Trans)Cultural Memory, I came to realize over the last few months that nostalgia is, in many aspects, is very closely connected to this larger field. In this context, I am fascinated by the multitude of ways in which nostalgia has been and is used as a particular mode of audience engagement within the medium of televsion. Arguably, such modes of engagement are nothing new, since TV has always offered a window into the past that allowed us to escape the present. I see current TV shows – ranging from HBO’s Stranger Things to Netflix’ Narcos and Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, just to name a few – as continuing in and re-combining elements of this trend. And this is what I’m currently deeply invested in.
Tobias Steiner is a part-time PhD candidate at Universität Hamburg’s Department of English and American Studies. His PhD project (working title: “Complex TV’s (Hi)Stories of Transnational Pasts: U.S. Period Drama as Medium of Cultural Memory”) focuses on an integration of the televisual medium into the context of Cultural Memory Studies through an analysis of US-American television series. Parallel to that, he works as a research fellow at Universität Hamburg’s Universitätskolleg. Tobias currently also acts as postgraduate representative of ECREA’s Television Studies section and is enthusiastic about all things Complex television, both as a fan and a Cultural Studies-focused academic. He has published essays in journals and edited collections, with topics ranging from the discursive construction of authorship in Quality TV, to the transcultural circulation of television format pilots (currently in pre-publication stage).

• contact: steiner.tvstudies (at) gmail.com

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matthias stephan

Our age has increasingly been an era of nostalgia, which inflects in numerous films, television and other media, but in retrospect has had a spectral relationship with my work in literary studies. My long-standing research into postmodernism, and considerations of its wake, show a society longing for an era of answers – an epistemological underpinning that has been deconstructed but not meaningfully replaced. A turn to nostalgia is one reaction to that phenomenon, and has increasingly been a focus of my research. As I begin to look at literature, and investigate the role it can have in cultural problems – such as identity construction and climate change – I am increasingly drawn to exploring the ways that nostalgia is activated and can be used to motivate a shift in discourse and action.

Matthias Stephan (Aarhus University, Denmark) researches primarily on postmodernism, and its implications in the Gothic, science fiction, and crime fiction. His work has appeared in Scandinavian Studies, Coolabah, and La Questione Romantica, and an edited collection entitled Netflix Nostalgia. His first book Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2019) uses science fiction and detective fiction to explore postmodernism. He is general editor for Otherness: Essays and Studies, and coordinator of the Centre for Studies in Otherness. His current research is focusing on the role of literature, in particular cli-fi, can play in mitigating climate change – by using ecocritical theory, gothic affect, and nostalgia to encourage positive change.

• contact: engms (at) cc.au.dk

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grafton tanner

I am interested in nostalgia as a consequence of social instability under capitalism and a defense against it. How do the entrepreneurial ideologies of neoliberalism and the future-fetishizing rhetoric of Big Tech trigger nostalgia in the public? And what happens when our nostalgic reactions to traumatic events, like climate catastrophes and economic collapses, are then deliberately shaped and shared by media conglomerates and ruling elites? My research primarily investigates the nostalgia boom of the digital age, a time when nearly everyone has access to the sights and sounds of the past via communication technologies. The digital age is also the period in which the consolidation of major media conglomerates has resulted in nostalgic franchising and world-building. As a writer, critic, and emotional human being, I am committed to shattering the stereotype that nostalgia is essentially reactionary and, instead, demonstrating its reparative potentials in an era in which corporations and demagogues exploit it for their own gain.

Grafton Tanner is the author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, and The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. His writing on nostalgia, capitalism, and technology has appeared in The Nation and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the writer and vocalist for the band Superpuppet.

• contact: graftontanner (at) gmail.com

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alexander r. e. taylor

I’m interested in nostalgia for pre-digital or analogue technologies. This interest stems from my ethnographic work among doomsday prepper communities, where concerns are regularly voiced about the frailty and unreliability of digital technologies in post-collapse scenarios. By contrast, analogue technologies are often described as more ‘robust’, ‘resilient’ and ‘built to last’. My research explores how these narratives intersect with larger cultural debates about growing societal dependence on digital technologies.

A.R.E. Taylor is a Lecturer in Communications at the University of Exeter, UK. He is an anthropologist of data and communications infrastructure and the Marconi Fellow in the History and Science of Wireless Communication at the University of Oxford. His research concentrates on the material infrastructure and labour that underpins digital services. He is especially interested in forms of unanticipated disconnection from the internet, arising from the failure and breakdown of internet infrastructure. He is an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology and a founder of the Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group, a network of researchers exploring critical infrastructure protection in relation to global catastrophic risks.

• Contact: a.r.e.taylor (at) exeter.ac.uk

  Twitter: @alexretaylor