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As teachers, scholars, and heritage professionals, we are in the business of aestheticizing violence. We might be writing yet another essay about the Holocaust, putting together an exhibit about World War I, helping produce a film about Dafur, or organizing live twitter coverage of President Obama's visit to Yad Vashem. 1 On all these occasions, we are engaging with violent pasts that we find disturbing, fascinating, and intellectually challenging. We are attracted to "the dark side" of history and are assuming, for good reasons, that our audiences share our curiosities and values. 2 After all, we hope that our choice of metaphors, narratives, iconographies, and multi-media assemblages trigger self-critical reflections about humanity's predilection for self-destruction. We want to help build collective fantasies of belonging that will not be implicated in the kind of mass crimes that our ancestors and contemporaries have committed on a regular basis. To that end, we render violence bearable, intriguing, and repellent-by aestheticizing it.The persistence of cultural engagement with violent pasts has resulted in a pervasive, selfreflexive memory landscape and mediascape, especially but by no means exclusively in the West. But the seemingly firmly established discourses and institutions, all part of the rush to memory since the 1970s, are up against significant challenges. Popular and academic memory cultures, including their self-critical late twentieth-century renditions, are the product of linear media and the catastrophes of the World War II era. Holocaust memory, still the backbone of our official collective memories, is a creature of film, television, the print media, and an extensive museum and memorial infrastructure. Moreover, Holocaust memory was crafted by generations whose members either experienced World War II violence firsthand or had emotional ties to people who did. Consequently, our memory culture has to come to terms with two powerful, irreversible trends. People with autobiographical investment in World War II memory are quickly disappearing, and the linear media of the 1980s are rapidly reframed and displaced by interactive digital networks. The contents and structures of our collective memories of violence will have to change.The challenges directed at conventional twentieth-century formats of collective remembrance and our attempts to respond to them are nicely captured in an innovative initiative of the University of Southern California (USC) Visual Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, probably the most digitally advanced institution of Holocaust memory in the world. For a number of years, the Shoah

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Artificial intelligence is making history, literally. Machine learning tools are playing a key role in crafting images and stories about the past in popular culture. AI has probably also already invaded the history classroom. Large language models such as GPT-3 are able to generate compelling, non-plagiarized texts in response to simple natural language inputs, thus providing students with an opportunity to produce high-quality written assignments with minimum effort. In a similar vein, tools like GPT-3 are likely to revolutionize historical studies, enabling historians and other professionals who deal in texts to rely on AI-generated intermediate work products, such as accurate translations, summaries, and chronologies. But present-day large language models fail at key tasks that historians hold in high regard. They are structurally incapable of telling the truth and tracking pieces of information through layers of texts. What's more, they lack ethical self-reflexivity. Therefore, for the time being, the writing of academic history will require human agency. But for historical theorists, large language models might offer an opportunity to test basic hypotheses about the nature of historical writing. Historical theorists can, for instance, have customized large language models write a series of descriptive, narrative, and assertive histories about the same events, thereby enabling them to explore the precise relation between description, narration, and argumentation in historical writing. In short, with specifically designed large language models, historical theorists can run the kinds of large-scale writing experiments that they could never put into practice with real historians.

Public discourses on our past have intensifi ed over the past 30 years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. What is 'memory' under these conditions? How do we realize calls for 'interdisciplinarity' and also move beyond them towards a systematic set of conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for the investigation of social and individual memory, of people and their groups? Welcome, then, to the launch issue of Memory Studies.The name of this journal is a statement of intent in affording recognition, form and direction to work in this nascent fi eld, and in facilitating a critical forum for dialogue and debate on the theoretical, empirical and methodological issues central to a collaborative understanding of memory today.We welcome submissions that speak to a range of participants across memory studies. Articles may be explicitly based in the best methods of a single discipline or seek to bridge or synthesize research tools and traditions from different disciplines. Manuscript submission guidelines are available at: mss.sagepub.com and see also our website dedicated to developments in the fi eld: www.memorystudies.net.For our inaugural issue we have invited scholars distinguished by their writings on memory from an array of disciplines to contribute short articles setting out their views on the agenda, challenges and prospects for the fi eld and its core issues. Although these invitations were not overly prescriptive, their responses engage with overlapping and intersecting traditions and discourses, and also appear to speak to each other without the authors' knowledge of the other contributions. Furthermore, we are pleased that these are richly provocative: Memory Studies will energize research and debate, rather than merely follow and summarize it.The fi eld of memory studies mobilizes scholarship driven by problem or topic, rather than by singular method or tradition. Yet divergence in backgrounds and assumptions must be highlighted and deliberately negotiated, not wished away. Only by encouraging MEMORY STUDIES