'Narratives' Workshop

Collier Room, Hild Bede College, Durham, 8 May 2014

12:00 Lunch

Session One

12:45 MIKE CRESSEY (Durham): Restoration Plot Narratives: The first celebrity hardbacks?

13:15 NICKI KINDERSLEY (Durham): “The night is pregnant with an invisible thing”: Spy stories

and narrative issues in South Sudan

13:45 Tea break

Session Two

14:00 STAN NEAL (Northumbria): The Myall Creek Massacre and Competing Narratives in

Australian History

14:30 JESSICA PRESTIDGE (Durham): Fictionalising Thatcher and the Contested Historical Value

of Biography

15:00 Tea break

Session Three

15:15 KATHLEEN REYNOLDS (Durham): Writing the History of Women and Early Modern

Medicine

Training Session

15:45 ANDY MCKAY (English Language Centre, Durham): Making Yourself Heard: The historian's

voice in writing

16:30 Concluding discussion and History Lab NE business

17:00 Post-workshop social

No registration is required, but if you have any dietry requirements please notify the organisers

via historylab.northeast@gmail.com.

Directions to Hild Bede College from Durham station:

Follow the signs to 'city centre' down a long flight of steps, then cross the road at the large

roundabout and carry straight on over the river alongside the A690 Leazes Road. Continue

following this major road past another roundabout and uphill to a third roundabout. The

entrance to the college is off this roundabout to the right (you may need to cross the road via the

footbridge). For the Collier Room, follow signs to the Caedmon Building

(https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/hild-bede/HildBedeSitePlan.pdf). The walk from the station

should take around 20 minutes.

Funded by Centre for Academic and Researcher Development, Durham University

Here's a rare sight... a HLNE blog post!

This blog post serves two purposes. First, as a reminder that the call for papers deadline for our next event (on 'Narratives' at Durham University on 8 May) is tomorrow. What better way to spend a Sunday than writing a short abstract? Second, we thought it might be an idea to use the blog to start thinking about the theme of 'Narratives' in historical research before the event itself.

A long standing friend of History Lab (Northumbria University's Peter O'Connor) recently drew my attention to this Guardian article about truth in historical fiction. This is a somewhat different issue to that experienced by us researchers as though we may deal with narratives in various ways we're unlikely to pursue a particular narrative in our own research at the expense of academic integrity. That said, when discussing 'truth' in historical narratives the references to the ambiguity of 'historical fact' are of pertinence to us all.

As researchers dealing with various historical contexts - about which 'the facts' may be unclear - the appeal of a narrative to help us comprehend the events and processes we engage with is clear. However certain facts are often at odds with the broad narratives that historians have long used to situate and make sense of historical developments. In every whiggish account of teleological progress there are reactionary or conservative moments; Marxists conceptions are often complicated by actions that counteract economic processes; and, in my own research, the Saidian narrative of East versus West is undermined by the huge variables within these overly simplistic categories. Sometimes the nuance or complexity of historical events means that the facts don't lend themselves to a coherent narrative.

So how do historians reconcile the 'facts' (if they do indeed exist) with broader historical narratives? Come to our Durham event to find out!

Stan Neal 

(History Lab North East, Northumbria Rep)