Symposium - featuring the work of Professor Carolyn Steedman, Warwick University, 2013 Allan Martin Lecturer

Chair:    Professor  Marnie Hughes-Warrington, DVC (Academic), ANU

Discussants:   Professor Margaret Jolly, School of Culture, History and Language, ANU, Professor Gillian Russell, School of Cultural Inquiry, ANU

Scholars have recently been down a winding road of cultural, linguistic, and archival turns. Questions asked from the postcolony, about the West as the Subject, or the `I’ of the historical enterprise have made some of us pause in our tracks.
The retrieval of the subjective experience of being a person in the past, and the scholar's eagerness to make herself and subjectivity part of the historical story she tells is the corner Carolyn Steedman is turning now. The subjective turn has already forced historians to ask ethical questions about our rights, duties, and obligations to the past, but the questions this turn raises apply to other disciplines as well.
What are the protocols for recovering experience and particular pasts? Who has the right to write about lives lived in historical time? What is—or should be—the relationship between the scholarly self and the selves we study? 
This multi-disciplinary symposium will confront the possibility that the selves we study also involve the recovery of ourselves.

Normal 0 false false false false EN-AU JA X-NONE Normal 0 false false false false EN-AU JA X-NONE

Carolyn Steedman is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, where she has taught since 1984. Among her many books are Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), The Radical Soldier’s Tale (1988), Dust (2001), and Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (2009). The book about Joseph Woolley, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011.