Workshop on Historiography and Theory
Explaining Things Historically: New Approaches
Professor Simon Gunn
Wednesday, 23rd November 2011, 1-2pm
Historians are not good at talking about what they do. This session aims to encourage a conversation about the means by which we interpret the past in our writings. It intends to go beyond the idea that history is a narrative or ‘story’ to consider the more ambitious claim that history should first and foremost explain things. The masterclass will depart from two short pieces from a recent work by Timothy Mitchell (Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics and Modernity, 2002). In these readings Mitchell criticises binary divisions between representation and the real and proposes new ways of thinking about old questions of agency (who or what counts as a historical actor) and causation (how things happen). This will form the basis of an open discussion about our practice as historians and the choices that confront us in writing the past.
Simon Gunn is Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester. He is the author of The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class (Manchester U.P., 2000) and History and Cultural Theory (Longman, 2006), and co-editor with James Vernon of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (University of California Press, 2011)
To book a place please email pedro.ramospinto@manchester.ac.uk