What does it mean to write “intimate” histories? Intimacy is a practice of both historical actors and historians, at once a field of experience and a methodological disposition. The rise of global history has birthed a renewed interest in the intimate as a vector of the situated and the individual in the midst of narratives often concerned with depersonalized processes and networks. The intimate does not displace the global or transnational but views these histories from a different vantage point, exploring their significance in the realm of the everyday and the sphere of meaning-making. The body and the material are its central agents, and intimacy has remained entwined with gender, offering scholars a way of asserting the significance of gendered relations and analyses to narratives and scales that may otherwise skirt their importance.

The Society for the Study of French History will hold its 37th annual conference at the University of Manchester, from 30 June – 2 July 2024.

Argument

What does it mean to write “intimate” histories? Intimacy is a practice of both historical actors and historians, at once a field of experience and a methodological disposition. The rise of global history has birthed a renewed interest in the intimate as a vector of the situated and the individual in the midst of narratives often concerned with depersonalized processes and networks. The intimate does not displace the global or transnational but views these histories from a different vantage point, exploring their significance in the realm of the everyday and the sphere of meaning-making. The body and the material are its central agents, and intimacy has remained entwined with gender, offering scholars a way of asserting the significance of gendered relations and analyses to narratives and scales that may otherwise skirt their importance. The ‘intimate’ suggests something hidden and often secret, yet it does not simply reside in the private sphere. Norms of intimacy are bound up with openly contested hierarchies of gender, race and nation. The deployment of intimacy in recent historical research thus suggests potent ways to connect subjectivities, resistance, and counter-hegemonies (but also acquiescence and accommodation) to the structural and the collective.

As a category of analysis and scholarly priority, intimacy is rich in both promise and danger. As Lauren Berlant has observed, the intimate attracts insofar as it appears real (because individual, immediate, and emotional) in contrast to the constructed institutions of collective life. Premised on the (implicit) valorization of the individual and experience, it contains impulses toward empiricism and historical recovery that need robust consideration. As such, inquiries into intimate histories demand reflection on the purpose and subject of historical research, on the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, on the politics and potential of critical history, on the nature of our assumptions about agency and the nature of the individual self, and on the scope for epistemological renovation in the discipline.

We invite papers in all areas of French history and the history of the Francophone world but would particularly welcome papers that engage with intimacy and the concept of the self as a historical experience and as a methodology of historical research.

 Potential topics could include:

• Biography and autobiographical writing in historical research
• Histories of private life in global and transnational contexts
• Sources of the self and ‘archives’ of the intimate
• Sensory histories
• The local, the micro, and the case study as historical method
• Intimacy and its legal histories
• Family histories
• Histories of childhood and youth
• Histories of the body (including histories of race, gender, and disability)
• Histories of sexuality (same sex intimacies, adultery, sex work…)
• Histories of emotions (love, desire, grief…)
• Histoire des sensibilités
• Histories of intimate spaces (the bedroom, the confessional…) and scales of historical experience
• Intimacy and economic life

Submission guidelines

We invite contributions from scholars at all career stages, but particularly from early career scholars. Papers in English or in French should last for 20 minutes. Please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief biography of 50-100 words to ssfhmanchester@gmail.com

by the deadline of 26 January 2024.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Julie Hardwick, Jérémie Foa, Clémentine Vidal-Naquet

Scientific Committee

• Jean-Marc Dreyfus, University of Manchester
• Laure Humbert, University of Manchester
• Stuart Jones, University of Manchester
• Chris Millington, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Bertrand Taithe, University of Manchester
• Alexia Yates, University of Manchester