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

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 how my feelings about my past structured my present. Years later, in graduate school, I studied the ways that practices of representing the past, as well as the culturally fostered feelings of nostalgia, 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 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. His most recent book, Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt is forthcoming from OUP.

• contact: dwyerm (at) arcadia.edu

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irem elbir

My interest in nostalgia was sparked by the feeling I experienced when I listened to songs from the past. I thought it would be a great way to combine my love of music with my interest in nostalgia. Hence, my current research explores the relation between nostalgia and authoritarianism within the context of popular music culture. I also have studies on the link between cultural memory and popular culture..

Irem Elbir received a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Administration and master’s degree in Media and Cultural Studies from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She worked as a research assistant at At?l?m University in Turkey. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at Europa Universität Flensburg, her research interests include popular culture, cultural memory and nostalgia.

• contact: iremelbir94 (at) gmail.com

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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 an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Özye?in University, Turkey. He obtained his Ph.D. from Koç University, Turkey, with his dissertation “Politics of Nostalgia: Psychological Origins of Populism.” Previously, he was a visiting student researcher at the University of Georgia with a Fulbright grant. His research interests are political behavior and political communication. More specifically, his research focuses on populism, democratization, collective nostalgia, and nativism.

• 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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steen knudsen esquerda

My interest in nostalgia arose as an inevitable consequence of living in Catalonia in the years immediately following the political and social upheavals of a thwarted independence process. Working primarily on the philosophy of history of the Frankfurt School (especially the works of Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin), I began to approach theories about the constructiveness of the past, the negative dialectics of temporal critique, and the present phantasmagoria of past promises. In 2023, I began a doctoral program aimed at working on the modern and contemporary concepts and meanings of nostalgia. Although most current discourses on nostalgia focus on its relationship with memory, I am convinced that it is in delineating its relationship with imagination that the most important political, philosophical, and cultural contributions can be made.

Steen Knudsen Esquerda holds a major in philosophy and a minor in classical culture from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and he received a valedictorian award in the Master of Humanities at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). He also holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Thought and Classical Tradition from the University of Barcelona, where he received a scholarship for his research on the Frankfurt School. His interests focus on modern and contemporary continental thought, particularly political philosophy, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and Critical Theory. He is currently a fellow of the Humanities and Communication program at the UOC (Barcelona, Spain), where he is developing his doctoral thesis on the relationship between nostalgia, culture, and political imagination.

• contact: sknudsen (at) uoc.edu
  

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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 an Associate professor in communication studies at Sorbonne Université and member of the GRIPIC research group. She is a specialist of representations and instrumentalization of nostalgia, within the field of media, commodification, institutions and politics. More broadly, she published numerous works exploring memory studies. She has also worked on the imaginaries and spectacularization of animals from the 19th century to the present day. Her latest book, co-published with Camille Zéhenne, delves into Jean Baudrillard’s thought through a research-creation work, built upon an interactive fiction. Lately, she has been working on the place of nostalgia in migratory emotions.

• 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.

Sébastien Fevry is professor at the School of Communication in the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium) and coordinator of the GIRCAM research group. With Emmanuelle Fantin and Katharina Niemeyer, he has recently co-edited the book Nostalgies contemporaines. Médias, culture et technologie (Septentrion, 2020). He is also the author of numerous articles in journals such as Image & Narrative, Espacestemps.net, Studies in French Cinema, Memory Studies or Intermédialités. In 2020, he is one of the editors of a special issue of Cahiers de narratologie: Défilement, projection, performance. La lanterne magique comme dispositif narratif.

• 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 Examining post-1960s visual and material culture in the United States, her interdisciplinary work explores intersections across film and media, popular music, performance, contemporary art, gender and sexuality, memory, and subcultural studies. She is also an advocate for the public humanities, doctoral reform, and fair labor practices in higher education. She has published 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 received her PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine where she completed her dissertation on Downtown New York’s cultural scenes in the 1970s–1980s. ?She is currently an Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture Concentration in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS).

• • 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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andré habib

I’ve been involved and engaged with themes of technostalgia, analog nostalgia, retro aesthetics and material culture in my teaching, publications and research activities for a number of years now. My focus has revolved, among other things, around Kodak’s “analog renaissance”, Super8 revival and the persistence of analog film in digital environments. I piloted a funded project called « Le temps du retro: photographie, cinema, jeu vidéo » (2019-2024), with Suzanne Paquet and Carl Therrien, and more recently, “Environnement, medias, archives: pour une anatomie contemporaine de la nostalgie et de la mélancolie” (2023-2027), with Katharina Niemeyer, Magali Uhl and James Cisneros. I edited the special issue “Retourner (la nostalgie)” of the journal Intermédialités (no 39, Spring 2022) and, with Alice Michaud-Lapointe, the “dossier” of the journal Spirale on “Le temps du retro” (Fall 2018). I’m also responsible for the site Web Obsolescence (obsolescence.ca).

André Habib is a Full professor of Film Studies at the Université de Montréal and Director of the web journal Hors champ. His areas of research have focused on found footage filmmaking and the archive, experimental cinema, cinephilia and, more recently, technostalgia, intermediality, and melancholy.

• • • contact: andre.habib (at) umontreal.ca

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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 Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Open University of the Netherlands. His research is positioned at the intersection of media history, cultural heritage and digital humanities. He holds a Ph.D in media history from Maastricht University, an M.A. in media studies (research-master) from the University of Amsterdam, and a B.A. in cultural studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam. His dissertation “Hybrid Histories: Technologies of Memory and the Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, 1895-2005” explores the home movie as a twentieth-century family memory practice from a long-term historical perspective. Between 2017 and 2021, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) of the University of Luxembourg, where he was involved in the projects Digital History & Hermeneutics (2017-2019) and Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice & Theory (2019-2021). His book “Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice”, co-authored with Alexander Kolkowski, was published in 2023. He has published in amongst others NECSUS_Journal of European Media Studies, Journal of Digital History, TMG – Journal of Media History, Le Temps des Médias and various edited volumes.

• • • 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 Brexit Britain. 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 postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English Literary and Cultural Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany. He received his PhD from Paderborn University (Germany) for his dissertation on nostalgia in Brexit Britain which was published in 2023 by Brill | Fink under the title ‘Taking Back Control’ of the Nation and Its History? Contemporary Fiction’s Engagement with the Master Narrative of Nostalgia in Brexit Britain. Among his other key research areas are the BrexLit genre, historical fiction, political rhetoric, figurations of science / the social figure of the scientist in the Victorian era, contemporary (Northern) Irish cultural products and practices, as well as British popular culture.

• • • contact: dennis.henneboehl (at) fau.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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fabio la rocca

My interest in nostalgic is concentrate of the impulse of social culture and in particular about essence of the Pop Culture as phenomena that produce a particular imaginary of retro and nostalgic atmospheres. The nostalgic dimension is ramified in many singularities through the effect of “popization” of the social reality that contaminates the cultural spheres as TV series, objects, fashion, music… The nostalgia produces a kind of imaginary incorporate in archetypical forms producing symbols, myths, images, figures, constructing a kind of mosaic of pop nostalgic culture as a ramification of the past in the contemporary social dimension.

Fabio La Rocca is sociologist. Ph Doctor at Sorbonne University Paris, is Associate Professor at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 where he is the director of the department of sociology and researcher at LEIRIS (Laboratory of studies on social imaginary). He is member of the researcher group CAC (Communication, Art, City) at UERJ Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and member of the of the International Ambiances Network. Editoral coordinator of the journal Sociétés. Its interests of studies are about Visual sociology, Urbans ambiances, Social Imaginary, Culture and Media. He is the author of La ville dans tous ses états (Paris, 2013, trad. port. 2018), Frammenti di un immaginario mediale (2013) and several articles and book chapters.

• • • contact: fabio.la-rocca (at) univ-montp3.fr
      

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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) is an Assistant Professor at Stockholm University. She 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 Reinhart 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 is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye. An Associate Editor of the journal Adaptation, she is also co-editor of the volumes Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (with Eric Sandberg, Palgrave, 2017) and The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda (with Feride Çiçekoglu, Bloomsbury, 2022). Her monograph Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013) won the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award. Other writing has appeared in Adaptation — including an edited special issue on Adaptation and Nostalgia (2020) — as well as the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Camera Obscura, Open Screens, and a number of edited volumes, including A Companion to the Biopic (2020) and The Films of Wes Anderson (2014). She also produces multimedia scholasrhip, including videographic criticism and the podcast You Made Me Watch That?! co-hosted by Bilkent colleague Wickham Flannagan. Colleen’s research in nostalgia studies focuses on adaptation and national cinemas in France and Türkiye, with additional interests in film genres, star studies, and the work of filmmaker and multi-media artist Agnès Varda.

• • • 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 Ba?kent 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 ?stanbul 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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martha-lotta körber

My interest in nostalgia lies particularly in the area of post-digital media nostalgias. Due to the extensive mediatization of identity-forming life phases of childhood and youth, as well as accelerating media-technological and cultural transformation processes, media in the present are no longer just storage, but also the objects of nostalgia themselves. I am convinced that a post-digital transformed present brings radically altered technical conditions, practices, production, and reception logics in the field of media nostalgia and requires a discussion under new auspices. The technical and cultural functionalities of digitality and internet-based media culture – which massively intervene in all other cultural industries – are fundamentally embedded in contemporary media nostalgias and corresponding social practices.

Martha-Lotta Körber is a doctoral candidate and research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the Institute for Modern German Literature and Media at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. After her master’s thesis on the topic of Holocaust remembrance on Instagram, she is working on her dissertation on ideology and subjectivity in American drug cinema. Additionally, she is working as an editor on an interdisciplinary anthology on the subject of post-digital media nostalgias, which will be published in 2025.

• • • contact: mkoerber (at) ndl-medien.uni-kiel.de

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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 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 books Mediated Nostalgia, Nostalgic Generations and Media, Subjective Experiences of Interactive Nostalgia (editor), as well as his published chapters on television remakes, apocalyptic time travel media, and the future/functions of nostalgic media. The projects he is currently working on include a chapter on the video game Death Stranding and its interactive past, and exploring existential thought across media.

• • • 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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anna marchi

I am a corpus linguist interested in the exploration of nostalgic discourses across different texts and contexts. My fascination with nostalgia started for methodological reasons, relating to challenge of identifying linguistic markers that create nostalgic meaning. The pragmatic functions of signaling (and triggering) the emotion may, in fact, manifest through multifaceted renderings, my aim was (and still is) understanding how a corpus-assisted approach can contribute to systematically and comprehensively identify the mechanisms that express and invite nostalgic feelings (see for example: https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/480). The appeal of the methodological quest soon turned also into a fully fledged passion for this inexhaustibly rich topic. Charlotte Taylor and I set up a reading group, a collaborative bibliography (https://nostalgiadiscourse.wordpress.com/home/), and organised an interdisciplinary workshop (https://centri.unibo.it/colitec/en/events/two-day-workshop-using-corpus-discourse-methods-to-study-nostalgia) and a summer school dedicated to the analysis of nostalgic discourses using corpora. We are currently working on representations of nostalgia over 70 years of UK parlamentary debates and newspaper texts. I am also working on personal nostalgia in the BBC Desert Island Discs.

Anna Marchi a senior assistant professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Bologna. My main research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, methodology, news discourse, and the language of emotions. Recently I have been investigating nostalgic discourses across text types. I have collaborated with the Universities of Siena, Cardiff, Swansea and Lancaster.

• • • contact: anna.marchi(at)unibo.it
      

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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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diego a mejía-alandia

My research interests in nostalgia are rooted in Memory Studies and Cultural Studies, fostering a broad and interdisciplinary approach. My doctoral dissertation explored the intersections between nostalgia and identity in cinematic representations of former East Germany. As a Postdoctoral researcher, I have expanded my expertise into Game Culture Studies, integrating interactive narratives that playfully connect lesser-known national histories with globalized nostalgia built on popular culture and personal memory. In an era where nostalgia plays a key role in shaping and interpreting the past, my research focuses on the (re)construction, influences, and negotiations of memory and identity through representations of post-communist nostalgia. My current interests delve into the phenomena of nostalgia and memory in video games associated with cultural processes derived from national and popular history. This includes the nostalgia for the Soviet Space program, the examination and rewriting of communist pasts, and the projection of post-communist futures and utopias. Conceived as an interdisciplinary endeavor, this approach investigates the intricate ties between cultural/national memory and individual/collective identity, drawing from both Eastern and Western material and popular cultures.

Diego A. Mejía-Alandia holds a PhD in Philological Studies from the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain, and MAs in Literary and Cultural Studies; Translation and Interculturality; and Scriptwriting, Narrativity, and Audiovisual Creativity. His research is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from Game Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and Memory Studies to provide a nuanced understanding of contemporary phenomena of nostalgia. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Universidad de Sevilla, he has conducted an individual research project on representations of post-communist nostalgia in video games, VR, and digital experiences. This project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and the European Union’s NextGenerationEU initiative, was initiated in collaboration with the Game Research Lab at Tampere University’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies in Finland, where he served as a Visiting Researcher.

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

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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 Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He worked in media and communication (IfKW) at LMU Munich and the University of Augsburg in Germany, where he also did his PhD on mnemonic practices and nostalgia in digital public spheres. 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 a co-founder of the International Media and Nostalgia Network (IMNN), is co-founder of the ECREA Temporary Working Group Affect, Emotion & Media, and has published several articles, chapters, and his dissertation about media and nostalgia. Lately, he has been working primarily on political nostalgia, collective memory, and history.

• • • 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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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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asami nakamura

The focus of my interest is on the generative aspect of nostalgia, particularly in speculative fiction. In my past presentation on a Black Mirror episode, ‘San Junipero'(2016), I explored the idea of queer nostalgia which involves an attempt to revision mainstream collective imaginaries to reclaim the existence of minoritarian subjects. I further developed this idea in my article on Ishiguro’s _Never Let Me Go_ (2005), with a focus on gender and sexuality. In my current project on techno-orientalism in speculative fiction, I am exploring how the intersection of race and gender/sexuality enriches the discussion on nostalgia and trauma..

Asami NAKAMURA (she/they) is a lecturer in European and American Studies in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University, Japan. Since completing a Ph.D. (University of Liverpool) on nostalgia in dystopian and homecoming novels by Katharine Burdekin, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, they have been teaching and doing research on utopian/dystopian literature and science fiction at various universities in Japan. Their major publications include ‘On the Uses of Nostalgia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s _Never Let Me Go_’ (Science Fiction Studies, vol. 48, 2021), _Reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Beyond Feminist Dystopia_(a collection of essays in Japanese co-edited by themselves and Megumi Kato [2023]). They also co-organised an international symposium with Stefan Würrer on feminist/queer utopias and dystopias at which they presented a paper on queer nostalgia in the Black Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’(2016).

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katharina niemeyer

In the winter of 2011, I was sitting with Céline and Olivier in a living room somewhere in Quebec and our conversations were filled with nostalgic thoughts of past and future times and distant places. We began talking about the incredible boom of these longings in the media and in social networks. On that very evening I decided to organise an international conference on the topic. It eventually took place in September of the following year at the University of Geneva under the name ‘Flashbacks-nostalgic media and other mediated forms of nostalgia conference’ and most of the proceedings but also invited papers were then published in the Palgrave Macmillan volume (memory studies series) “Media and Nostalgia“. The idea of the IMNN has emerged during a discussion with Emmanuelle, Ekaterina and Manuel at the IAMHIST conference in Bloomington 2015. Since then I have (co-) signed numerous publications on nostalgia. 

Katharina Niemeyer is Professor of media theory at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), Faculty of communication – Media School. She is director of the research Center CELAT-UQAM (Cultures-Arts-Sociétés) and cofounder of the research-creation mXlab. Her current research and research-creation projects embrace the questions of (creational) solastalgia, loss and media as well as digital nostalgia and intermediality. Katharina Niemeyer has published numerous books and articles dealing with nostalgia, media and technology; most of them in English and French, but also German, and Portuguese.

personal website: www.kniemeyer.net

• • • contact: niemeyer.katharina (at) uqam.ca

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zamansele nsele

The language of time is often relied upon to articulate the dissonances and contradictions that typify the post-apartheid South Africa. My research is focussed on post-apartheid nostalgia and the various ways that it intersects with identity and cultural practices. My background is in Art history & Visual Culture; therefore, my research is primarily guided by visual representation. I look into how the violent primal scenes of colonial- apartheid continue to calibrate the psycho-social life in South Africa suggesting a cyclical pattern of one state of unfreedom to the next. Post-apartheid visual culture is saturated by a nostalgia that is in tension with the future. My current research focuses on the role that visual devices play in facilitating perpetual returns and repetitions.

Zamansele Nsele (born in 1986) lectures in Art History & Visual Culture at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Post-Apartheid Nostalgia and the Future of the Visual Archive’.

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

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adam ochonicky

My research explores nostalgia in a variety of contexts, including regional spaces, film and literary studies, and genres such as horror and science fiction. In my book on nostalgia and regionalism, I analyze the American Midwest’s place-identity and conceptualize three forms of nostalgia: what I describe as “nostalgic spatiality,” “nostalgic violence,” and “nostalgic atonement.” For my contribution to The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia, I further address the conceptual interconnections of nostalgia and regionalism by detailing how both terms/practices are inherently contextual, relational, and argumentative. Elsewhere, two of my scholarly articles use genre texts—selected Halloween films (1978-2018) and the original Star Trek films (1979-1991), respectively—to examine the nostalgic dynamics of serialized narratives and media franchises. One article demonstrates how the revisionist practice of retroactive continuity (retconning) is a nostalgic intervention within a franchise’s overarching narrative. The other article considers how memory-oriented aspects of media franchises correspond to the associative operations of human memory and technological recall in the digital era.

Adam Ochonicky is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism (Indiana University Press, 2020). His work has appeared in Science Fiction Film and Television, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, Adaptation, Horror Studies, Screening the Past, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Television Finales: From Howdy Doody to Girls (Syracuse University Press, 2018), ReFocus: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (Routledge, 2024). He serves as the Media Review Editor for Middle West Review (University of Nebraska Press).

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

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gilad padva

I am interested in nostalgia and media, particularly in sexual and political contexts, because of the nostalgia’s ability to empower subaltern minorities. As I suggest in Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (2014), a constructed gay nostalgia, often reflected by the New Queer Cinema in the 2000s and 2010s, redeems not only the film protagonists, but also the gay viewers’ lost youth. It is a nostalgia-in-motion, or what I define as motionostalgia, an ongoing process of change or movement in the perception, cultivation, reevaluation and rearrangement of time. The reimagining of the earlier periods, particularly the crucial stage of gay adolescence and transgressive coming-of-age repositions the subject in his/her interrelations with what happened before. In this respect, motionostalgia is a creative energy that provides an invaluable resource of hope, aspiration, well-being and optimism that empowers the viewers who experienced so much bullying and humiliations in their youth, or still experience daily hardship.

Gilad Padva works for Beit Berl College and the Open University of Israel. He holds a Master (with distinction) in Philosophy (Tel Aviv University). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Cinema in 2007 (Tel Aviv University). His major areas of research are in the field of cinema studies, television and media studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies and queer theory. He is particularly interested in the interrelations of cinema, popular culture and music, temporalities, spatialities and sexualities; with a focus on (collective) identities and (counter)cultural histories.

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

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mario panico

I started to investigate nostalgia by looking at the modalities in which the feeling is “practiced” by people in urban space, through rituals and unpredictable actions.
From my perspective, what is most interesting is how nostalgia is “performed” and “constructed” in the space, becoming a useful tool to understand political changes and the reversal of cultural and social values. If it is true that space always talks about the society which built it, when, through practices, it becomes a “space of nostalgia”, it tells us much more about the modality with which people rewrite (sometimes in a short-sighted way) their past.

Mario Panico is a Ph.D. candidate in Semiotics at the University of Bologna (Italy) and at TraMe – Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Cultural Memory and Traumas. His doctoral research, entitled “Nostalgicscape. A Semiotic Approach”, investigates the role of nostalgia in Italian spaces of memory. In particular, he is investigating the (neo) fascist nostalgic practices in Predappio, the hometown of Benito Mussolini.

• • • contact: mario.panico (at) gmail.com

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michael pickering

My interest in the relationship between media and nostalgia is long abiding and stems from several areas of my academic work. Earlier in my intellectual career there was a focus on the uses of popular song and music as means of expressing nostalgic feelings and values, the various sources of attraction and appeal in popular traditions, and comparative presentations of past and present as a means of critique in working-class writing. More recently, with my colleague Emily Keightley, I have been concerned with two major manifestations of nostalgia in media representations. We refer to these as critical and regressive forms of nostalgia with, in the first case, nostalgia operating as a source of creative renewal or judicious mode of assessment of changed social conditions and arrangements, and in the second, nostalgia resulting in what we call retrotyping, which among other things leads to the foreclosure of imaginative uses of the past in the present as a result of an appeal only to sentimentalist yearnings for the past, especially in mass merchandising, consumerism and promotional culture. Our conceptual approach to nostalgia identifies three components – loss, lack, and longing – with the manifestation of nostalgia in media texts and images in any particular case depending on how these components are, or are not, aligned. Overall, my interest in differential forms of nostalgia is directed towards the development of a more refined understanding of the cross-temporal dynamics they entail both in and across time.

Following posts at Leicester University, Sunderland University (both UK) and Massey University in New Zealand, from 1992 I taught in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University (UK). In March 2015, I moved to an Emeritus Professorship from which I continue to research and write in a number of different fields. My work covers popular music, racism and popular culture, imperialism and theatrical history, Mass Observation, working-class writing, news and documentary, stereotyping and representation, humour and comedy, creativity and cultural production, media and memory, conceptual history and historical hermeneutics. I have also written extensively on research methodology, including a co-edited collection on research methods in memory studies. I have published nineteen books as author or editor, and written over one hundred journal articles and chapters in edited collections.

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tristan paré-morin

In an age when nostalgia is omnipresent in the media, entertainment industries, and even in presidential elections, I feel compelled to understand the histories behind it. As a musician and musicologist, I find that music is central to many of those collective, urban, and popular displays of nostalgia. Yet, what constitutes musical nostalgia remains elusive and unstable. At best, “nostalgia” is a vaguely-used term when applied to music, as its meaning can change from ear to ear. My interest is therefore in the political, economic, and social forces that affect the collective reception of some types of sounds and musics as nostalgic in specific historical moments, especially when these forces reveal the discontinuities between various musical, social, and political milieus.

Tristan Paré-Morin is an adjunct professor in musicology at the University of Ottawa. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Pennsylvania. His work addresses the musical institutions and listening practices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and North America from the combined perspectives of music and nostalgia studies. His research on nostalgia in post-World War I Paris was funded by a Chateaubriand Fellowship. Lately, Dr. Paré-Morin has been researching early representations of the concept of nostalgia in musical works.

• • • contact: Tristan.Pare-Morin (at) uottawa.ca

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milica popovic

Belonging to the generation who has had the opportunity to see the both worlds, my interest in nostalgia and notably Yugonostalgia comes from the deep personal need of understanding what has happened to Yugoslavia and how are we dealing with the Yugoslav identity today. Wishing the overcome the revisionist narratives of the official politics of memory, and the banalizing public discourse about the “transition losers”, I’ve decided to research a specific generation – the generation of last pioneers and to identify the subersive potential(s) of nostalgia.

Milica Popovic is a political scientist, specializing in Memory Studies, Political Sociology and Higher Education Studies. She obtained a PhD in Comparative Political Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and in Balkan studies at the University of Ljubljana. She has been Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Lead at the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom at Central European University in Vienna from 2021 to 2023, and for her work at CEU she is a recipient of DAAD Fundamental Academic Values Award for Early Career Scientists. Popovi? also worked as a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris. Currently, she is working as an independent researcher and consultant on various projects within and beyond higher education. She has been a visiting fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (November 2021), the Institute for Contemporary History in Ljubljana (October 2023), and the Open Society Archives in Budapest (January/February 2024). While finalizing her monograph on Yugonostalgia and the memory narratives of the generation of the last pioneers in the (post)Yugoslav space, she is currently developing a new research project on the memory narratives of deserters in Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

• • • contact: milica.popovic (at) sciencespo.fr

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landi raubenheimer

I am interested in nostalgia especially in the context of analogue media. This interest came about through research conducted towards my PhD, which investigates nostalgia in Neill Blomkamp’s (2009) film “District 9”, which I am interrogating particularly for how it portrays the landscape of Johannesburg. The study investigates the notion of place in the film and in photography and popular media in South Africa between 1994 and 2018, especially in relation to a poetics that I entitle nostalgic dystopia. This project has lead me to research analogue nostalgia, as well as reflective nostalgia, which is an ironic and self-reflective nostalgia I think may be at work in societies that are in a state of post-trauma.

Landi Raubenheimer is Senior Lecturer in Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. She completed a joint PhD at the University of Gröningen in the Netherlands and the University of Johannesburg. She has published in South African and international journals and is also a practicing artist working in the medium of papermaking. Her research interests include photography, film, landscape, and of course, nostalgia.

• • • contact: landir (at) uj.ac.za

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marta romero

I am interested in the representation of nostalgia through artistic mediums, specifically in film. I am particularly fascinated by the various forms nostalgia adopts, from William Faulkner’s novels to Tarkosvsky’s cinema. In my PhD thesis I will be highlighting the differences of representation depending on culture, place, historical time and/or artistic movement.

Marta Romero is a photographer, researcher and PhD student in Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests range from postmodern American cinema, film philosophy to Beat Generation literature, with a focus on women’s work. She is also interested in museums and cultural studies. She holds previous work experiences as an intern at the Museum d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona (MACBA) in the Exhibitions department, as well as collaborating and working in several art fairs in Madrid, while receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid.

• contact: martaromero.lop (at) gmail.com

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niklas salmose

I am mostly interested in the aesthetics and experience of nostalgia, or what Fred Davis terms “a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right”. I commenced research on nostalgic style in my Ph.D. dissertation from University of Edinburgh, Towards a Poetics of Nostalgia: The Nostalgic Experience in Modern Fiction (2012). An important aspect of nostalgic aesthetics is how media operate within multimodal and cross-sensorial categories in order to trigger nostalgic impulses in media receivers. I am also elaborating on the very definition and taxonomy of nostalgia, differentiating it from memory, dividing it into emotion and mood, and relating it to existential angst.

Niklas Salmose works in the intersecting fields of intermediality, modernism, ecocriticism and nostalgia with a range of different media types: games, films, TV-series, literature, and music. He has published widely on the aesthetics of nostalgia, and more recently, on nostalgia in relation to the ecological emergency. He is currently writing the monograph Mediations of Nostalgia: Aesthetics, Intermediality, Ecology for Edinburgh University Press.

contact: niklas.salmose (at) lnu.se

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xenia tsiftsi

Having worked as an archaeologist in Greece for a decade, nostalgia has been one of the core issues that have concerned me. The love for the ruined monuments and the anguish of re-creating an ideal past is part of Greek people’s idiosyncrasy, especially in an era of major worldwide social crisis that fosters the decline of cultural values. Nostalgia also came up during my doctoral research in Holocaust Museums. Initially, as I was researching the transmediation of memory from discourse to architecture, I realised that a common design element of the cases I was studying was the descent to a dark underground space, which constitutes a symbol of the descensus ad inferos (Nekyia), a metaphor of the bowels of the underworld, where, according to Jung, within the belly of the unconscious, the visitor makes contact with his ancestors and retrieves individual and cultural creation myths. As a result, he becomes a pilgrim who moves unrestricted through the boundless time- space continuum and, as Betsy Hall wrote, engages in a threefold meaningful and promising process of descent, dis-memberment and re-membrance. In fact, during the analysis of bodily and emotional reactions to architecture, visitors from Jewish Diaspora countries and Israeli descendants of survivors expressed a sense of restoring continuity and connection with their predecessors, and experienced their fragility. Such results certify the architect’s intensions- like Libeskind stated, he wanted his buildings to evoke a “spiritual and cultural longing”- and, accordingly, ascertain a close relationship between nostalgia and memory construction.

Xenia Tsiftsi is a Greek archaeologist and art historian, with experience both in field archaeology and in monument reconstruction and restoration. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Museum Studies and a Master of Architecture in Design, Space and Culture. Currently, she is a PhD researcher at the School of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and works as a museologist at the Directorate of Archaeological Museums, Exhibitions and Educational Programmes, a central Service of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. Her research interests lie in politics of shaping collective memory and national/ community identity through the bodily experience of space. The particular focus of her research is on Holocaust memory construction through museum architecture across European countries.

• Contact: xeniats85 (at) hotmail.com

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dario vuger

My interest in nostalgia is a consequence of my wider inquiry and research in visual culture of the 20th century from the standpoint of visual studies, contemporary phenomenology and the history of counter-culture and cyberculture movements of the later part of the century. Considering it a current contemporary instalment of the spectacle – overcoming the distinctions of integration/disintegration, concentration/dispersion – nostalgia becomes the synthetic principle of the organisation of appearances and construction of (artificial) worlds through which our longing becomes radically deterritorialized into desires for commodified association with certain images (of the world and of ourselves). The phenomena of nostalgia is thus central for my research into the philosophy of the spectacle as a critical praxis of contemporary phenomenology with the sole aim of achieving any prospect for authentic action in the age of – what Heidegger prophetically dubbed – the age of the world picture.

Dario Vuger (born in Zagreb, 1991) is a curator, photographer and a researcher in contemporary philosophy. He obtained his MA in philosophy, art history and heritage studies from the University of Zagreb, Croatia and PhD from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia with the dissertation title “Spectacle and Time in Contemporary Philosophy”. He lives and works in Osijek, Croatia as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, is a contributor to the projects of the Centre for Visual Studies in Zagreb and is a member of Central and East European Society for Phenomenology (CEESP), International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the Croatian Association of Artists of the Applied Arts.

• Contact: dvuger (at) gmail.com & https://linktr.ee/quietlife

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mellow wei

I am interested in exploring how nostalgia is constructed and worked through different mediums from socio-political and cultural studies perspectives. I am particularly inerested in how contemporary cultural needs or ideological purposes constructs a nostalgia that reshape the past, as well as how personal narratives and collective memories reimagined each other in a non-western context. I want to bring in more anti-eurocentric approaches for media and nostalgia studies, considering countries where the impact of commercialism on state-controlled information systems are not same as western countries. In the future, besides visual communications like film, I wish to explore more about memory preservation/ construction in material culture and urban studies.

Mellow (Jueran) Wei completed their Communications and Philosophy undergraduate studies at the University of Southern California with an honor degree in Communications. Their senior thesis explored the contrasting nostalgia constructed in two important contemporary Chinese political films. They use critical discourse and textual analysis to deconstruct the medium and reveal the socio-political struggles behind their creations. In the future, they want to continue to examine the politics of nostalgia and memory from an interdisciplinary perspective, as well as the resistive power of alternative narratives against dominant texts.

• contact: mellowwei7 (at) gmail.com

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tim wildschut

My research on nostalgia flows from a longstanding interest in self-conscious emotions, in particular their vividness

Tim Wildschut is associate professor of psychology at the University of Southampton. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His main research interest is in self-conscious emotions, in particular nostalgia.

• contact: R.T.Wildschut (at) soton.ac.uk

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kathleen williams

I’m interested in the intersection between nostalgia and popular culture, particularly in relation to screen and internet cultures. My PhD topic looked at recut film trailers—user-generated trailers that mash together footage from one or more existing sources to create a trailer for a film that won’t exist—through the lenses of anticipation and nostalgia. Since completing my PhD, I’ve been developing this interest in nostalgia in a number of ways. Firstly, through nostalgia for videotape and video stores, and more broadly through a project on media waste and memory. I am also developing my work on nostalgia in relation to online teen communities and publications.

Kathleen Williams is a lecturer in Journalism, Media and Communications at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her research looks at the unintended or unexpected uses of media technologies, including the degradation and reevaluation of media objects.

• contact: kathleen.williams (at) utas.edu.au

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tim wulf

Remembering all the things I used to do on a rainy Sunday 15 years ago makes me feel nostalgic. I used to “hang out” with my friends named Super Mario, Link, or Yoshi and if I was not allowed to do so, I decided to hang out with Simba, Son Goku, and Disney’s Gummi Bears. Today, these media heroes remind me of who I was and what was meaningful for me as a person with all the dreams I held back then. In my research I want to investigate how media (content) as some kind of artifact can provide human beings with meaning, reminding them who they were back in the past, and how this is related to the somehow ambivalent feeling of nostalgia.

Tim Wulf (born 1990) is associated researcher at the Professorship for Media- and Communication Psychology at the University of Cologne and research assistant at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He holds a Master in Media Culture and Media Psychology (University of Cologne). His research interests are the psychological mechanisms and effects of nostalgia in a media context. What media characteristics affect their ability to function as artifact to elicit nostalgia and how do people psychologically benefit of nostalgia being elicited through media consumption?

• contact: wulf.tim (at) googlemail.com