Scholars and Their Kin

Auteur

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.

Texte du rabat

"Stâephane Gerson's edited collection spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about that most slippery and opaque of subjects, their own families-a practice that many historians have long felt has been discouraged professionally. In a remarkable number of ways, the diverse lineup of contributors here bring into the open the difficulties and complexities-personal, professional, and historiographic-that ensue from not distancing themselves from their subjects but stressing their closeness. Gerson suggests that historians overall might write better histories if they felt free to acknowledge that what speaks to them professionally might also be what moves them personally"--