LAUSR

In their Inaugural Editorial for the first issue of this journal nearly 10 years ago, Andrew Hoskins, Amanda Barnier, Wulf Kansteiner, and John Sutton (2008) wrote that the journal’s purpose was to afford “recognition, form and direction to work” in the “nascent field” of memory studies (p. 5). To be sure that first issue of the journal contained a variety of views on the “field” of memory studies, including whether it was one, or should be, and, if so, what kind it was or might become. Yet, 10 years later, few can doubt that the journal has fulfilled its charge, both reflecting and bringing about the field whose central organ it has become. Neither memory studies nor Memory Studies is nascent any longer. At the same time, the current issue of the journal contains at least two discussions that evaluate the current status of the field and make suggestions for its development. In the first case, a symposium of leading authors reflects on the publication of a new handbook (Tota and Hagen, 2016) that surveys the state of the art across numerous disciplines. In the reviews, there is still concern about what should and what should not be included in the field, for instance, philosophy (yes) and neuroscience (maybe, maybe not). The second case, an article (Dutceac Segesten and Wüstenberg, 2017) of which one of us is an author, surveys the field’s development and expresses concern that while memory studies has clearly been intellectually compelling, it is as of yet insufficiently institutionalized. While the field is no longer nascent, it is, thankfully, not yet complacent! In 1998, Olick and Robbins (1998) called “social memory studies” a “non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise” (p. 105). That may still be relatively true institutionally, as Dutceac Segesten and Wüstenberg demonstrate. But it is obvious to us that it is by now less true intellectually. As compendia such as Tota and Hagen’s (2016), Kattago’s (2015), Olick et al.’s