The Primary Source: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Memory and Identity

Fontbonne University, in partnership with the Missouri History Museum and sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, announces Primary Source, an interdisciplinary conference on the connections between memory--both individual and collective--and identity. The human experience is deeply rooted in memory.  It is the raw material of personal identity and community.  It informs our narratives, generates our myths, justifies our politics, and sustains our cultures.  Memory gives us our autobiographical individual selves, yet memory also binds us to one another.  In spite of this, memory is always contentious and selective, even traumatic, and its meanings are subjective.  Thus memory divides our ideologies, our faiths, our daily experiences.  Memory is always an intersection of the present and the past.  The study of memory requires the sciences.  Psychology tells us how memories are encoded, stored, and retrieved in the human brain, how they influence our decisions and our sense of self, and how they are vulnerable to distortions and forgetting.  Library and information science and museum studies- the expanding domains of the digital humanities-  address how memories are externalized- archived, preserved, retrieved, and used in the present.