Co-hosted across the University of Bristol's Senses & Sensations research group, the Department of History and the Centre for Health, Humanities & Science
Historians (as a group) tend to struggle with personal experiences and their work. Autobiographical disclosure, personal experience and emotional investment is not touched on as part of PhD training, and for career historians it usually appears (if at all) firmly constrained in prefaces, acknowledgements, forewords, afterwords, epilogues and appendices. There is also a thriving market for late-career historians to pen their autobiographies, explaining their scholarly output, but at some distance from their work of "the history itself". However, there are some historians, from at least the 1970s, drawing on different disciplinary traditions (psychoanalysis, anthropology, postmodern literary criticism, critical race theory, feminism and general political activism) who have tried to bring "the personal" into a productive and fundamental relationship with their scholarly output. Sometimes this concerns personal experiences in archives, sometimes it centres around aspects of sexual orientation and/or gendered and/or racial identity, and at others it involves particular experiences or events (e.g. motherhood, child abuse, psychiatric diagnosis, miscarriage, rape). This talk will show how various traditions that influence history bring with them a link or prompt to "the personal", and will examine how personal experience has been used or managed in various works of history. This is in the context of my own historical work on Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, my mother's persistent illness behaviour, and my childhood in and out of hospital on various pretexts. It centrally asks, not only how have we got to a place where historians might manage these personal experiences usefully in their work, but what does it mean at a basic level to "have experience" of something that one is researching?
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Chris' research focuses on the history of psychiatry and medicine in the twentieth century, particularly around self-harm, suicide, faking illness and child abuse.