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This article serves as both an état présent of emerging scholarship in the interdisiplinary field of Memory Studies and a conference report following the first MSA Forward interactive workshop which preceded the second annual conference of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in December 2017. MSA Forward is the postgraduate arm of the Memory Studies Association and offers a platform for exchanging ideas amongst a cohort of emerging scholars engaging with recent developments in Memory Studies and interacting with key academics in the field. The idea of engagement, with its political undertone, draws attention to the political valence and ethical sensitivity of emerging research as evidenced in this article, which contends that if Memory Studies is to be moving forwards as well as looking back, then it is important for emerging scholars as well as established academics to be at the forefront of the field.

Through the Fall of 2019 and Spring of 2020, the Memory Studies Association (MSA) was hard at work planning its fifth annual meeting, which was to take place in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA), in June 2020. We had chosen Charlottesville for a number of reasons, including the desire to hold the meetings outside of Europe as well as because one of us works at the University of Virginia and was able to arrange use of the university's facilities. More significant, of course, was the notoriety Charlottesville had obtained 2 years prior, when a violent "alt-right" "rally" was held there to protest the city's plans to remove two statues honoring Southern military leaders from the US Civil War (1860-1865).The call for papers thus read as follows:Although long important in US history, Charlottesville became more widely known in August 2017 when White nationalists staged a rally to protest the city council's decision to move a monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the center of the city to a more peripheral location. The protest devolved into a melee resulting in three deaths, and frightening images quickly spread around the world. Since then, Charlottesville has come to stand for conflict over the unworked-through legacies of the American past, and as a flashpoint in debates about racial justice, populism, and commemoration. In addition to its relevance for the unworked-through legacies of the American past specifically, Charlottesville has entered transnational discussions about the legacies of slavery, segregation, and antisemitism more broadly. The 2020 meeting of the MSA will therefore highlight questions about the role of public memory in democratic societies and in the struggle for racial justice.Alas, it was not meant to be. Throughout the Spring, we watched anxiously as first reports of COVID-19 led to unprecedented lockdowns around the world and to an increasing sense of crisis-of public health, of the economy, of governance, and ultimately of ontological security. Like

Bryan Cheyette is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading, where he directs the Identities and Minorities research group. His comparative research focuses on critical ‘race’ theory, postcolonial literature and theory, diasporic literature, Holocaust testimony, and, more recently, the social history of the ghetto. In January 2019, the Warwick Memory Group invited Bryan Cheyette to give a public lecture on ‘The Ghetto as Travelling Concept’, in the light of his forthcoming A Very Short Introduction to the Ghetto (2020), and a workshop on ‘Unfenced Fields in Academia and Beyond’. In a wide-ranging interview, Bryan Cheyette speaks of the interconnections between Jewish studies and postcolonial studies, bringing these into dialogue with memory discourses and our contemporary moment. Image of Prof Cheyette, photo credit Cesar Rodriguez

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