History in the First Person: From Antiquity to Our Time

On August 24-26 the post-graduate humanities summer school 'History in the First Person: From Antiquity to Our Time' will be held at HSE. The event is organized by HSE Faculty of Humanities, the Centre of Franco-Russian Research in Moscow, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris), and Eastern Studies Research Group of Strasbourg University. Expert lecturers will take part in discussions of the research projects presented by participants.

The purpose of the Franco-Russian forum is to learn how an individual voice or author sounded, or was fixed in texts and images from ancient times, and to determine which research strategies historians, philologists and philosophers should apply to discover that voice.

Medieval historian, Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and one of the organisers of the summer school Oleg Voskoboynikov explains:

‘The idea of the summer school is to have a dialogue between professors and history, philosophy and literature students at several European universities. The organisers have laid plans for about 30 students to take part in discussions in French and English. All of us, historians, linguists, philosophers and specialists in culture are united by an interest in listening to history as told in the first person singular. It might sound banal but the question of methodology is not at all simple. That’s why we have suggested a broad chronological framework with no limits on geography. So we can ‘synchronise our watches’ and compare methods used by very varied researchers in looking for living human voices. The Early Modern Period is the the most well represented on the programme as it was then that individual voices began to be heard more often in concrete texts. Even so, some of the lectures on Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance show us that individual voices could be heard then as loudly as they are today.’   

Ego History, the history of subjectivity, new biography, the history of autobiography - are all areas of study of a wide field in contemporary humanities where philosophers, literary scholars, historians, sociologists and art historians are producing new research. They examine primarily texts, written or recorded in the first person - correspondence, diaries, autobiographies, poetry, memoirs, wills, denunciations, interrogations, interviews, contracts, and books of remembrance from medieval monasteries. Sources of this kind of information - from medieval manuscripts to blogs - are as varied as the approaches to their analysis. These approaches have significantly enriched our dialogue with past societies in the last decade, having revealed new and intriguing epistemological perspectives.

Until recently the diary, like anecdotal evidence in general, would be used to illustrate an argument, to provide a representative example in order to understand the systems and structure of large periods of time. But now the status of personal experience, the unrepeatable gesture, even a word accidently discarded, but recorded by history has changed radically. In other words, history has discovered direct speech. It is this direct speech, when we can hear it or decipher it as evidence of antiquity or the present, that interests the organisers and participants in the summer school.

The summer school will consider the following:

• A conversation about oneself and the work of a character rethinking and rearranging their own experience when they describe it. 
• Letters and other forms of creativity as self-reflection. 
• Letters, involved in personal and collective forms, fields of argument and criticism in which a personal position is born, ripens and finds expression. 
• The individual voice, multiple voices, polyphony and cacophony. 
• The language of subjectivity, cultural, religious, political codes, usages and habits. 
• Censorship, self-censorship, coded language. 
• The authorial I in poetry and prose. 
• The grammar of first person speech: problems with sources and methodology with texts and other materials. 

‘For me, personally,’ concludes Voskoboynikov, ‘this summer school is important because it is our first big project with EHESS, my alma mater, which has recently become our official partner. Besides, we are in discussions about long term cooperation with the University of Strasbourg, one of the biggest universities in France. CEFR has been working with HSE since it began. They are our trusted friends and we must nurture that friendship.’