Erin Peters

Proposed Research Title: ‘Constructing Cultural Memories: Print and Oral Culture in Restoration England’

Research interests:

Currently a full time MPhil/PhD student, my research explores printed pamphlets and ballads from the pre and post Restoration years (1658-1668), examining the construction, transmission, maintenance and contestation of national pro-royalist cultural memories in England at this time. In particular, it will determine the extent to which aspects of the past were remembered or forgotten, utilized and neglected, for the needs of pro-royalist groups in the present and how this can be in identified print sources of the time. The overriding goal is a specifically concentrated history of cultural memory production that will develop an explicit representation of this period in English history.

Other research interests include: Nostalgia and nationalism; conceptions of identity; remembering and forgetting; memory, censorship and propaganda.

Academic Qualifications:

  • B.A., history (major), English literature and political science (minors), Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, 2005.
  • M.A., cultural memory, University of London, UK, 2009.
  • PG-Cert., research methods, University of Worcester, UK, 2010.

Publications:

  • The ‘Heritage Minutes’ and Canadian Collective Memory: Nostalgia, Nationalism and Cultural Memory” in The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (book chapter, forthcoming 2012).

Conference Papers:

  • 2011 ‘The ‘Heritage Minutes’ and Canadian collective memory: An analysis of the uses of nostalgia and nationalism to build a unifying cultural memory’ (Memory, Mediation and Remediation conference, Wilfrid Laurier University).
  • 2010 ‘The medium is the message’- printed ballads and the construction and transmission of cultural memories in early modern England’ (Postgraduate BSECS conference, University of Worcester).
  • 2010 ‘The articulation of not remembering and forgetting in Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood’ (Nationalism(s) and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood conference, University of Worcester). 

Memberships:

  • Early Modern Research Group (EMRG), University of Worcester.
  • British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS).