Scholars and Their Kin

Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments

Stéphane Gerson

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
19 February 2025

Writing & editing guides; Historiography; Family history, tracing ancestors

Spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about the most slippery of subjects: their own families.

Historians have often been discouraged from writing about their relatives, subjects who are deemed too close for objective analysis. But new work by scholars interested in their own families raises fascinating questions about subjectivity—and how historians might put it to use. It also invites historians to abandon traditional aspects of academic writing and draw, instead, on literary forms more equipped to highlight the relationships between scholar and material, feeling and reason.

Scholars and Their Kin embraces diverse approaches to such writing, bringing into the open the personal, professional, and historiographic complexities that ensue when scholars write intimate yet self-aware histories about their families. The first book devoted to this genre, which editor Stéphane Gerson terms ""personal family history,"" this anthology features ten essays and an afterword by scholars working in this vein. The contributors—varied in their disciplines, themes, and nationalities—reflect on their motivations and methodological choices, the politics of family history, and the institutional constraints they have sometimes faced. Making full use of the creative possibilities of voice and form, they expand the literary ambitions of personal family history, provide readers with narrative models, and address questions of shame, responsibility, love, gendered and racial violence, family archives, as well as the tall tales, myths, misrepresentations, memories, and omissions that suffuse family lives. Scholars and Their Kin will interest historians, scholars in other disciplines, and readers interested in family histories that open broader worlds.

Edited by: Stéphane Gerson
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 399g
ISBN: 9780226820811
ISBN 10: 0226820815
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 19 February 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Stéphane Gerson is professor of French, French studies, and history at New York University. Among other books, he is the author of Disaster Falls: A Family Story and The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France.

Reviews for Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments

""A fascinating and innovative collection of essays by scholars using their research, interpretive, and writing talents to explore their own family pasts, and to consider the threads that link those intimate inheritances to broader questions about history, memory, power, and love. Often beautiful, surprising, and urgent, Gerson's volume is a gift.""--Ada Ferrer, author of ""Cuba: An American History"" ""A volume that could be transformative for historical writing.""--Thomas Trezise, author of ""Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony"" ""A wonderful collection of essays, each of which uses the scholar's own family to elucidate larger questions or themes within the historical discipline more broadly. Scholars and Their Kin contributes to an ongoing discussion in historiography about the nature and boundaries of the field, and specifically the relationship between professional history and family history, which has long been a site of tension.""--Katie Barclay, author of ""Academic Emotions: Feeling the Institution""