SO YOU WANT TO BE A HISTORIAN?
Nicholas B. Dirks
History and Theory 61, no. 3 (2022)
Review of How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000. Edited by Herman Paul. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 222.
If the directed focus on “scholarly personae” recommended in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000 is to be genuinely useful, we would need to attend far more systematically to historiographical differences, debates, and styles as rooted not only in the counterpoint between individuals and institutions but also in the larger contexts that govern how we identify what historical issues matter and the larger purposes and conditions of historical scholarship. We would need to identify more clearly not just how historical work is conducted but the ways prevailing debates over historical meaning and method have come to have specific names attached to them. The current crisis in the academic humanities puts all this in sharp relief, since the interest in scholarly personae also invites discussion about institutional conditions of historical work, from the existence of regular opportunities for careers and employment in the academic historical world to the vastly uneven distribution of institutional resources. What I argue for here is a kind of reflexive institutional historicism—the imperative, in other terms, to conduct historical work with a simultaneous concern for the present meanings and implications of the work itself and for the complexity of the interpretive questions raised by one's historical engagement with sources, questions, traditions, theories, and institutional conditions. Indeed, we need not focus on the theoretical aspects of history in order to appreciate the extent to which theory inflects, and is inflected by, the choices we make (and that are made for us) about everything from how to be a historian and who can be a historian to what kinds of historians we might be and, ultimately, what kind of history we write.
