'The Ulster-Irish Border, Protestant Imaginative Geography and Cultural Memory in the Irish Troubles', in Adriana Corrado and Maurizio Ascari eds, Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, Amsterdam and New York: RODOPI, 2006, pp237 - 250

In 2001, I was invited to join a proposed European Network, 'Cultural Memory in European Countries: An Interdisciplinary Approach' (known as ACUME) as the representative of the University of Brighton, which became a Partner Institution in the Network's successful bid (led by the Universities of Bologna and Warwick) for funding from the EU's Socrates/Erasmus programme. In 2003 I participated in a workshop held in Bertinoro, Italy, to plan the Network's activities from 2004-06, and contributed to the shaping of one of five subgroups, on the theme of Memory and Place, with colleagues from universities in Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and the UK.

I presented papers at all three ACUME conferences organised by the Memory and Place subgroup: 'Cultures of Memory, Memory of Cultures' at the University of Cyprus (see Output 3); 'Sites of Exchanges: Cities, Borders, Rivers, Seas' at the University of Naples, Italy, September 2004; and 'Place and Memory: Reconstructing the Past' at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, June 2005. All three conferences have given rise to publications which include one of my essays on memory in the Irish Troubles: 'Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory', on Bloody Sunday (see Output 3); 'Cultural Memory, Reconciliation, and the Reconstruction of the Site of the Poppy Day Bomb in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland', in Eysteinsson ed., forthcoming 2007; and this paper on cultural memory and Protestant imaginative geography of the Ulster-Irish Border. ACUME provided a stimulating context for developing my ideas about the relation between memory and place in the Troubles; an environment involving exposure to a range of European intellectual traditions drawn on by cultural historians, critical theorists, and scholars in comparative literature; and rich debate about papers exploring a wide variety of cultural landscapes, local and national, at different historical moments. See link.