Professional Historians in Public: Old and New Roles Revisited
Edited by Berber Bevernage and Lutz Raphael
The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope.
Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining their professional activities with an explicit political partisanship or social engagement. The second section focusses on the challenges historians are confronted with when entering the court room or more generally exposing their expertise to legal frameworks. The third section focuses on the effects of policy driven demands as well as direct political interventions and regulations on the historical profession. A fourth section looks at the challenges and opportunities related to the rise of new digital media. Finally several authors offer their view on normative standards that may help to better respond to new demands and to define role models for publicly engaged historians.
This book aims at historians and other academics interested in public uses of history.
Contents
Frontmatter
The Politics of Historical Thinking
Contents
Introduction
1 New Roles for Professional Historians and New Public Uses of the Past
Berber Bevernage and Lutz Raphael
Part One: Histoires Engagées: A Critical Look Back
2 Eric Hobsbawm as a Public Champion of Cosmopolitan Universalism
Stefan Berger
3 Two Sides of Activist Scholarship Within UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964–1998)
Larissa Schulte Nordholt
4 Colonial Historiography, Hindutva, and the Difficulty of Reading the Ancient Indian Historical Traditions
Kanad Sinha
Part Two: Law and Historical Expertise
5 Challenges of Historical Expert Witnessing in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Elsewhere
Vladimir Petrović
6 The Waitangi Tribunal and the Public Life of History
Bain Attwood
Part Three: Old and New Public Demands on Professional Historians
7 Between Discipline and Profession: Historical Studies and Their Public Relevance in Brazil
Fernando Nicolazzi
8 Policy-Oriented History for the EU: The Rise of a New Type of Professional Practice for Historians?
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt
9 Indigenous History, Activism, and the Decolonizing University: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Struggle over the Khoisan Past in Post-apartheid South Africa
June Bam and Rafael Verbuyst
Part Four: Public History in New Media
10 Russian Public Historians in the New Media (The Case of Telegram)
Alexandra Kolesnik, Boris Stepanov and Irina Savelieva
11 Practices of Popular Science and Digital Curation in Theory of History on the Portuguese Edition of Wikipedia
Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo
Part Five: Perspectives: Moral, Epistemic, and Political
12 Historians and Human Rights Advocacy
Antoon De Baets
13 The Politics of Memory and the Task of Historians
Jakob Tanner
14 Languages of Legitimation and the Registers of Legitimate History
Benjamin Zachariah
Biographical Notes
Selected Bibliography on ‘Public Uses of the Past and the Role of Professional Historians in the Public Sphere’
Index
Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Copyright year: 2023
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111186047/html#contents