HIST 301
Approaching the Past: Biographical Methods Spring 2025
Division II

This seminar grapples with the methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and ethical challenges of writing biography, and of using biography as an approach for understanding the past. We will ask how historians attempt to understand the past through the lives of individuals; and how historians attempt to understand the lives of individuals through a wide range of interpretive methods. As we explore the goals, challenges, and possibilities of the genre of biography as practiced by historians, we will consider questions about archival abundance and archival scarcity; about the contested meanings of “facts” and the function of imagination; and about the different scales and categories of analysis used by historians writing biographies. We will consider a variety of answers to these questions by reading theoretical work about history and biography, as well as by reading examples that represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches.