During the 20th century the project of the Enlightenment reached its peak in Europe and the Western world in general. However, in retrospect it is clear that the civilizing efforts of the Enlightenment, the striving for individuality, emancipation, and free-dom, have been thwarted in many respects. Throughout the last century, power poli-tics violated social and political core values to an almost unbelievable extent. Due to Verdun, Vietnam, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago, and Guantanamo the 20th cen-tury will undoubtedly be remembered as the century of ethnic conflicts and genocides.

Political oppression, persecution, ethnic cleansing, wars, and ultimately experiences of exile, transculturation, and cultural hybridity created fault lines in the lives of many people and deeply affected the construction of both individual and collective  identi-ties.

Haunted Narratives – The Politics and Poetics of Identity Formation and Life Writing is a joint research project of philosophers, and literary, and cultural scholars from the Universities of Berne  (Prof. Gabriele Rippl), Basel (Proffs. Philipp Schweighauser, Therese Steffen) and Tartu (Proffs.Margit Sutrop, Tiina Kirss). This effort is aimed at gathering insights into how individuals and communities deal with haunting memories and traumatic experiences, i.e. how they represent the past orally, acoustically, visual-ly, and in written form. The focus of the project is on both the poetics and the politics of life writing (trauma narratives, memoirs, biographies, fictional autobiographies, biopics, and so on).

Two week-long graduate conferences ("Haunted Narratives I & II") have been held at the Universities of Tartu (25-31 May 2007)  and Berne (8-11 May 2008). A collection of essays based on those conferences is forthcoming in 2010.