8th Annual Heritage Lecture

Changing concepts of the Future and the 'Ethics of Repair

Professor Aleida Assman

Universität Konstanz

This lecture was given on Friday 28th February 2025 at Jesus College, Cambridge

A recording of the lecture can be found on our Resources Page

About the lecture

Over the last decades, the Western concept of ‘future’ has changed radically. The lecture will focus on this change in the larger framework of “the decline of the time regime of modernity”. As sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has just argued in a recent study, the decline of the promise of continuous progress is responsible for a wide-spread “sense of loss” in middle-class society. But this is not the whole story. It has also opened up the space for alternative forms of imagining the future and new perspectives for the politics of remembering, forgetting and dealing with the past. One of them is an “ethics of repair” that is being proposed as a new framework for dealing with heritage in the context of modern architecture.

About our speaker

Professor Aleida Assman is is professor (emerita) of English and general literature at the University of Konstanz. In addition to numerous works on English literature and the archaeology of literary communication, she is particularly concerned with the theme of memory and forgetting. Together with her husband, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, she coined the term cultural memory. In 2018, Aleida and Jan Assmann were awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.