Wulf Kansteiner is Professor of Memory Studies and Contemporary European History at Aarhus University. His research interests include the methods and theories of memory studies; the role of visual media -- TV, film, digital culture -- in the formation of cultural memory; post-narrativist historical theory; and Holocaust and genocide history, memory, and historiography.
Kansteiner studied at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and UCLA. He taught at the University of Tennessee, Kent State University, Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, and Binghamton University (SUNY) before moving to Aarhus University in 2014.
Kansteiner has been President of the Memory Studies Association (MSA), is co-founder and co-editor of the Sage-Journal Memory Studies, and a member of Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies. He has been PI of the Velux Foundation funded project SoundTrak and work package leader of the Horizon2020-project UNREST. Kansteiner serves on a number of international boards including the advisory board of the Leibniz Research Consortium Value of the Past, the History of the Ruhr Foundation, and the International Network for Theory of History. He is also a member of the editorial board of the DeGruyter series Media and Cultural Memory, the CEUP series Memory, Heritage and Public History in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Cambridge UP Journal Memory, Mind & Media.
Key publications include the monograph In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Ohio UP); the co-edited volumes Agonistic Memory and the Legacy of 20th Century Wars in Europe (Palgrave), Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard UP), Den Holocaust erzählen? Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität (Wallstein) and The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke UP); and the articles “Digital Doping for Historians: Can History, Memory, and Historical Theory be Rendered Artificially Intelligent?”, “History beyond Narration: The Shifting Linguistic Terrain of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands,” “The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Digital Anxiety, Transnational Cosmopolitanism and Never Again Genocide without Memory,” "Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor," and "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies." Texts are available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wulf-Kansteiner-2.
Kansteiner’s current work deals with the relationship between Holocaust memory and postcolonial memory, the role of sound and artificial intelligence in processes social remembrance and social forgetting, the concept of agonistic memory, the relationship between academic history and the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, and the narrative and logical structure of professional academic writing.
