Ann Rigney is an Irish/Dutch cultural scholar and Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the transnational interaction between narrative and cultural memory and is authoritative in the field of Memory Studies.
Life
Rigney was born in Dublin and studied English and French at University College Dublin. In 1987 she gained her PhD at the University of Toronto in Comparative Literature . From 1988 to 2000 she was a lecturer in Literary Theory at the Comparative Literature programme, University of Utrecht; in 2000 she was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2003 she was appointed to the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht. Rigney is married to the Dutch cultural historianJoep Leerssen; they have two children.
Research
Most of Rigney's research deals with the interactive dynamics between narrative and cultural memory. Her early work dealt with narrative and imaginative strategies in history-writing and historical novels, with special attention to writers like Jules Michelet, Thomas Carlyle and Sir Walter Scott. She then turned to more general models of how the past is configured in the present-day imagination, and to the question how this imagination is expressed and communicated. Building on the earlier work of Hayden White, Pierre Nora and Aleida Assmann, Rigney's research focuses on the dynamics of cultural memory: how are memories expressed across different media and how do they move between different audiences, generations or nationalities? Rigneys work has recently shifted from a nineteenth-century to a contemporary focus. Her work since 2000 has dealt with the poetics and function of public apologies and with the cultural memory of political activism Among Rigney's theoretical concepts and models are
the principle of cultural scarcity, meaning that cultural expressions have to compete for a limited reservoir of public attention and will try to pack a maximum of historical significance into as concise an expression as possible;
the fact that the canonicity of historical memory is commensurate with its likelihood to be expressed in different media;
* these media involve, besides the textual or visual, also the tactile and the performative ;
* these media all have their specific conventions and formal structures, which will in turn affect the nature of how memories are articulated and communicated.
the mobility of memories along a twofold axis: intermedial as well as transnational, and their wide impact on social practices.
the role of "embodied communities" : physical gatherings of people for commemorative or identity-affirming purposes.
Rigney has evinced a wish to seen Memory Studies move beyond its “traumatic paradigm”, i.e. its tendency to concentrate on those collective memories that involve suffering and catastrophes. In her historiographical theory she resists a view of history centered on ideal-typical historians ; this, she argues, fails to do justice to the wide range of practices, academic and otherwise, through which societies take account of the past.
