Times told, times lived, and times of telling: temporality and life cycles in oral history
This seminar is about the affect-laden relationships between past and present that are brought into being in oral history interviews. How do historians work with accounts of childhood that are given in late life and encompass decades of social and cultural change, from the histories of family members before the teller’s time, to their own experiences of childhood, parenthood, and grandparenthood? We will draw on our two recently published studies of children and war, Roper’s interviews with British First World War descendants (published as Afterlives of War, Manchester, 2023), and Dodd’s interviews with French women and men who were children during the Second World War (published as Feeling Memory, Columbia, 2023). Comparing testimonies from two cohorts, two countries and two wars, we will reflect on the temporal kaleidoscopes of memory that interviewees create from a past that precedes them, a present of remembered experience refracted by the life cycle, and the future audiences they imagine.
All welcome- this seminars is free to attend but registration is required.
This page was last updated on 30 June 2024
