Introduction: Memory work: Naming pasts, transforming futures

A simple, automated message that many have seen on our ubiquitous mobile technologies: “Memory almost full”. Too many memories yet not enough memory. Sir Paul McCartney, glancing down at his mobile phone in the early 2000s, saw this understated text message, which triggered a self-reflection on the musician’s illustrious life and career while inspiring the title for his fourteenth solo album. Prompted to delete (or forget?) one’s memories by the non-human limits of data storage is a fitting point, we believe, to consider the so-called “memory boom” not only in academe but also within memory’s everyday persistence in dis/ordering worlds. Indeed, memory, as it seems, is everywhere. From lieux to oblivion, cells to museums, text messages to dementia—memory as an object of study is perpetually elusive and evolving, as several chapters in the Handbook attest to (see Medved and Brockmeier; Ruin). In concert to these transformations, the field of Memory Studies continually refocuses and reinvents itself, searching for moments, events, and places in an effort to locate the multitude of ways that memory makes it way into lives, or in fact is life (see Del Giudice et al; Ventura; McCraty). At times overtly political and public, at other times, subtle and ephemeral, Memory Studies since the 1980s has gained an increasing amount of attention from scholars in widely varying disciplines and perspectives (Mendels 2007; Radstone and Schwartz 2010; Olick et al. 2011; Kattago 2015). As a consequence of this creative and intensive development, Memory Studies now represents a well-established field of research (Tulving and Craik 2005; Erll and Nunning 2010).