David Lowenthal, professor emeritus in the Department of Geography at University College London, has played an important role in the recent reemergence of social memory as a field of study.  Lowenthal’s 1985 work, The Past is a Foreign Country, served as reminder to scholars in the humanities and social sciences that memory acts as the foundation for individual and group identity.  His work influenced a number of researchers including Paul Connerton, author of How Societies Remember (1989), and Ruth Van Dyke and Susan Alcock, co-editors of Archaeologies of Memory (2003).