The Mystery of Memory: In Search of the Past

Speakers

Speakers

André Aciman, PhD

City University of New York

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.

Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College. Aciman received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the PhD Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir "Out of Egypt" (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to "Out of Egypt," Aciman has published "False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory" (2001) and "Alibis: Essays on Elswhere," and two novels, "Eight White Nights" (2010) and "Call Me By Your Name" (2007), for which he won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited "Letters of Transit" (1999) and "The Proust Project" (2004) and prefaced "Monsieur Proust" (2003), "The Light of New York" (2007), "Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View" (2010) and Stefan Zweig's "Journey to the Past" (2010).

His forthcoming novel "Harvard Square" will be published in Spring 2013.

Joseph LeDoux, PhD

New York University

Joseph LeDoux is a University Professor at NYU in the Center for Neural Science, and he directs the Emotional Brain Institute of the Nathan Kline Institute. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion and he is the author of "The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self." LeDoux has received a number of awards, including the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philsophical Society, the Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science, the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, the American Psychological Association Donald O. Hebb Award, the Karl S. Lashely Prize from the American Philosophical Society, and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Acadmey of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Scince. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids.

Daniel Schacter, PhD

Harvard University

Daniel L. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Schacter's research explores the relation between conscious and unconscious forms of memory, the nature of memory distortions, how individuals use memory to imagine possible future events, as well as the effects of aging on memory. Schacter has published over 350 articles on these and related topics. He has received several awards for his research, including the Troland Award (1991) and Award for Scientific Reviewing (2005) from National Academy of Sciences, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (2009) from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (2012). Many of Schacter's studies and ideas are summarized in his 1996 book, "Searching for Memory," and his 2001 book, "The Seven Sins of Memory," both named as New Times Notable Books of the Year, and winners of the APA's William James Book Award.

Alison Winter, PhD

University of Chicago

Alison Winter is a historian specializing in the history of the human sciences. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was on the faculty at California Institute of Technology before moving to the University of Chicago. Her first book, "Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain" (1998) on the history of mesmerism examined how Victorians explored altered states of mind, and in the process, debated the character of scientific inquiry and the nature of interpersonal influence. Her second book, "Memory: Fragments of a Modern History" (2012) examined the history of sciences of autobiographical memory in the twentieth century. She traced the history of two opposing claims. One saw memory as a faithful recording (likened to motion picture film or tape) of personal experience; the other claimed memory was more dynamic, continually reconstructed by present experiences. She traces the careers of these opposing representations until their violent conflict in the 1980s and 90s in the so-called "memory wars" over childhood sexual abuse.

Moderator

Steve Paulson

Executive Producer, Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally-syndicated program To the Best of Our Knowledge

Steve Paulson is the executive producer and an interviewer with To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Peabody Award-winning radio program produced at Wisconsin Public Radio and syndicated nationally by Public Radio International. Paulson has written for Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent and other publications. His radio reports have also been broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. His recent book, "Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science," was published by Oxford University Press.