Status of Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories

We begin with a brief discussion of the building blocks of supersymmetric grand unified theories. We recall some of the compelling theoretical reasons for viewing supersymmetric grand unification as an attractive avenue for physics beyond the standard model. This is followed by a discussion of some of the circumstantial evidence for these ideas.Comment: 12 pages plain LaTeX to be run twice. Invited talk at the XII DAE Symposium on High Energy Physics, Guwahati, India, Dec. 26, 1996 - Jan. 1, 199

Digital ethnography, resistance art and communication media in Iran

Iranian visual materials relating to the presidential election crisis have the potential to become the sites of analysis and debate for fields as diverse as history, visual history, memory and post-memory, or trauma studies. References to memory are now omnipresent in scholarly discourse and in a wider public debate: ”social memory’, “collective remembrance”, “national memory”, “public memory”, “counter memory”, “popular history making” and “lived history” jostle for attention.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Traumatic pasts, literary afterlives, and transcultural memory : new directions of literary and media memory studies

This article presents new directions of literary and media memory studies. It distinguishes between (1) the study of "traumatic pasts", i.e. representations of war and violence in literature and other media, (2) diachronic and intermedial approaches to "literary afterlives" and (3) recent insights into the inherent transculturality of memory and their consequences for literary and media studies. Keywords: cultural memory studies, literature and memory, media and memory, transcultural memor

Making meaning and meaning making: memory, postmemory and narrative in Holocaust literature

This paper explores links between narration and memory in Holocaust literature and examines ways in which individuals construct memory and postmemory. Based on the premise that ‘All authors mediate reality through their writing...’ and taking into consideration that what we remember and how we remember is likely to have a significant impact on the narratives that we construct, this article considers the reliability of memory. It argues that whilst there is, at times, a blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction in Holocaust literature, this has little or no impact on the validity and authenticity of the narratives. In an attempt to address these issues more fully, this paper explores the notions of making meaning and meaning making, whilst considering the effects of positionality, time and trauma on memory. Key texts referred to in this discussion include Night (1958) by Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (1996) by Elie Wiesel, In My Brother’s Shadow (2005) by Uwe Timm and The Dark Room (2001) by Rachel Seiffert. These texts have been chosen in order to highlight the subjectivity of memory and postmemory and to demonstrate the role that narrative plays in their construction and representation

The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies

Jay Winter delivered the following in the form of a lecture at the Canadian War Museum on 31 October 2000. A distinguished academic, Winter has been writing about the cultural history of the First World War for nearly three decades. He has taught at the University of Cambridge in England and is presently at Yale University. Since 1988, he has been a director of the Historial de la grande guerre in Peronne, an important war museum in northern France. In this capacity, he has become familiar with a great many institutions of war and military history around the world and he has great knowledge and familiarity with the important historical and intellectual debates that will be fundamental to the creation of a new Canadian War Museum, which is now slated to open in May 2005. Probably Winter’s best-known book is Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History published in 1995. In it, he argues that the rituals of mourning associated with commemoration after the First World War had a history stretching far back in human life and experience. In this he contradicts the thinking of Canadian historian Modris Eksteins who argued that the Great War marked the birth of the modern age. Lately, Daniel Sherman has proposed that commemorative ceremonies and memorials are significantly politicized in the interests of state control. In the following paper Winter warns against the dangers of collective memory being collapsed into “a set of stories formed by or about the state” while also providing a rich overview of the great importance that attention to memory and culture studies has taken on in contemporary thought. These cannot be ignored in any serious attempt to lay the intellectual foundation of any new museum, and perhaps especially may have specific relevance to a new war museum

An Evening with David Blight

Monday evening, November 18, students from Gettysburg College got to sit down and discuss memory with Dr. David Blight from Yale University, author of the renowned work Race and Reunion. The session was conducted as an informal panel with Dr. Blight and Gettysburg College’s own Dr. Isherwood and Dr. Jordan. Dr. Blight spoke about beginning his work when memory studies was not an official field and stumbling his way headlong into working with the memory of the American Civil War. When discussing whether or not memory studies were a fad that would pass away, Blight reassured the audience that people have doing memory studies long before there was an official field. Memory is essential to who we are as human beings and all peoples and all nations construct their past in a way that is useable to their future. [excerpt

Test anxiety, working memory, and cognitive performance: Supportive effects of sequential demands

Substantial evidence suggests that test anxiety is associated with poor performance in complex tasks. Based on the differentiation of coordinative and sequential demands on working memory (Mayr & Kliegl, 1993), two studies examined the effects of sequential demands on the relationship between test anxiety and cognitive performance. Both studies found that high sequential demands had beneficial effects on the speed and accuracy of the performance of test-anxious participants. It is suggested that the more frequent memory updates associated with high sequential demands may represent external processing aids that compensate for the restricted memory capacity of individuals with high test anxiet

Observations on the relationship between verbal explicit and implicit memory and neuronal density in the left and right hippocampus in temporal lobectomy patients.

The relationship between neuronal density and verbal memory in left and right hippocampal subfields was investigated in patients who underwent surgery for alleviation of temporal lobe epilepsy. The surgery consisted of unilateral partial removal of the hippocampus along with the anterior temporal lobe and amygdala. Study 1 looked at post-surgical explicit versus implicit verbal memory for lists of words while Study 2 looked at pre- and post-surgical explicit memory for word pairs. Left subfield CA1 appeared to be the most consistently involved in explicit and implicit memory. The results of the two studies confirm presence of hemispheric asymmetry in verbal memory. The notion that hippocampal control of memory is most apparent in post-surgical performance is discussed