Scholars and Their Kin

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.

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.