ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

“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”

“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”

“[An] important, creative, and deeply moving collection of essays. . . . Many of the essays in this collection deal with difficult topics in microcosm and macrocosm: untimely death, secrets, scandal, silence, violence, untruth, myths of origin, identity, the desire to forget. But the authors never flinch away from the emotional nature of writing about ‘kin.’ The essays draw on personal and official archives, interviews, individual recollections, photographs, and objects. This unusual blend of emotional connection with deep, specialist research makes for profound storytelling and fascinating reading.”

— History Today

“In Scholars and Their Kin, ten authors apply their different methods of inquiry to uncover hidden familial stories. The authors explain . . . their process of investigating the past. In the best chapters, rigorous research leads to discoveries of experiences and feelings of family members or acquaintances that move both author and reader to empathize.”

— Journal of American Culture

“What Scholars and Their Kin shows us, and represents of the field more broadly, is a different kind of intimacy with the past that should be reckoned with in the discipline of history and beyond.”

— Social History

“A refreshing, and indeed greatly needed, addition to historical scholarship in the broadest sense. . . . As historical research seems to (rightly) be returning to one less concerned with a somewhat Rankean objectivity and the eschewing of personal connection, volumes such as Gerson’s provide the most humane look at the past. I cannot heavily recommend Scholars and Their Kin enough—a book of unique focus, and a genuine page turner in places, the volume reminds every scholar of the profound humanity we might all seek to find in our own academic endeavors.”

— History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Stéphane Gerson

Leslie M. Harris

Christine Détrez

Martha Hodes

Stéphane Gerson

Loving

Martha S. Jones

Tao Leigh Goffe

Amy Moran-Thomas

Clare Hemmings

Marnix Beyen

Christine Bard

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

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