Every year, the Historical Fictions Research Network hosts an international, interdisciplinary online workshop on historical fiction. Calls for papers will be published here. We invite scholars from all over the world to come and join us for this international conversation. We have yet to find a time zone we cannot accommodate, so do join us in December!
2023 inaugural workshop
The Historical Fictions Research Network is proud to host its
inaugural, international, interdisciplinary online workshop on the subject of
Historical Fictions as Reparative Histories
9 December 2023 (online) – 7:00 to 17:15 (GMT)
Join us for a full day of 15 minute talks and presentations from every corner of the world. Please find here the preliminary programme. To join us, please write to historicalfictionsresearch@gmail.com detailing your name, email address and affliliation (if applicable).
Call for Papers
For a long time, there was a tendency among critics to dismiss historical fictions as inauthentic, inaccurate and fanciful: perhaps even as falsifications of history. They have also often been associated (in some cases justifiably) with conservative, escapist ideologies. Yet, more recent scholarship has highlighted the manifold uses of popular representations of the past.
These not only teach history to the interested public; they may also render the past more accessible and more democratic, giving everyman and everywoman their own history and questioning the authority of traditional, undemocratic elites. Moreover, the past in popular media may offer assurance in a world in flux by emphasising commonality across time and the universality of human experience.
In this workshop, we seek to examine the reparative potential of historical fictions, which may address and redress past grievances and give a voice to ethnic, sexual and social minorities and to groups which had previously been written out of history.
Moreover, historical fictions may imagine alternative histories in which past wrongs have not happened or which lay the groundwork for a better, more equal future. At the same time, such altercations can be critically interrogated, raising the question whether the erasure of social injustice from our historical imaginary blinds the public to its continued existence in the present.
Historical Fictions Research Network 