There is a long history of thinkers who have, to certain degrees, evaluated, reflected upon and tried to explain memory and remembering. Not surprisingly, this extends as far back as Plato and Aristotle as well as being found in the more recent philosophical thinking of writers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). It has developed from early sixteenth-century beliefs that ‘memory could offer unme-diated access to experience or to external reality’ (Radstone and Hodgkin 2005: 9) to late nineteenth-century challenges; as ‘modernity's memory’ was considered at once the utopian alternative to history (see Andreas Huyssen (1995) on Benjamin, Baudelaire and Freud) as well as something to be escaped from. It would be impossible for an introductory text to cover all this terrain and recently, as the field of memory studies has emerged, so too have appraisals and anthologies to aid the student interested in the origins and developments of memory as a concept (see, for example, Misztal 2003; Rossington and Whitehead 2007; Erll and Nünning 2008; Rowland and Kilby 2010; Olick et al. 2010). What this chapter can do is introduce the reader to the key issues, debates and ideas that begin to shape connections with media studies by drawing attention to the explosion of memory-related research over the last half-century.