Who's Got the Story? Memoir as History/History as Memoir

A Series of Events

Memoir and history are both about storytelling. Both attempt to make sense of our personal lives and the public world. But what methods distinguish these two approaches to understanding the human past? A fascinating gray area exists where memory intersects with history, where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts. The record always retains blank spaces—whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory. This blank space is the uncomfortable location where the historian and the memoirist do the work of interpretation and imagination.

This series of readings and panel discussions probes the tensions and connections between history and memoir as they are practiced in our times by leading writers.

There is video/audio from the conferences on Conference Schedule.

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