The field of inquiry examining how societies selectively remember and represent their pasts — through monuments, anniversaries, museums, and rituals — and the political, psychological, and cultural processes that determine what is preserved, what is forgotten, and whose experiences are rendered visible or invisible in public memory.
Every society chooses what to remember, and the choice is never neutral. A monument to one group is often a monument against another. A national anniversary tells a story about who the nation is — and the story always has a protagonist, which means it also has victims who remain offstage. Memory is not the passive recording of what happened. It is an active process of selection, emphasis, and narrative construction, shaped by who has power and what legitimacy they need. The study of memory asks: why do we remember what we remember, and what does it cost us not to remember the rest?