Instructor: Konstantina Zanou
What does it mean to enter history through a life? This course will combine the Italian historiographical tradition of microstoria with the global turn in historical studies, in order to explore a series of microhistorical and biographical works.
We will look at the biographies of people from the 15th to the 19th centuries who lived their lives on the move between empires and nation states and across continents and seas (such as Leo Africanus, Elias of Babylon, John Hu, Ugo Foscolo, Elisabeth March, Giuseppe Garibaldi, the early modern Jewish merchants of Livorno, captives, collectors and career makers in the British empire, as well as 19th-century intellectuals and migrants between the Mediterranean shores). But we will also deal with figures who never left home but had something interesting to say about how their world went (such as Domenico Scandella, Martin Guerre, Martha Ballard or Stephanos Vogorides). Through the micro-perspective of these individuals, the course will trace some of the big themes of the early modern and modern periods.
Students will be invited to reflect on the possibilities opened up by the new trend of ‘global microhistory’, on the prospects and limits of biography, on the autobiographical connotations of historical writing, on combining narrativity with scholarly argumentation, and on the authority of experience.
