If you are interested in doing any pre-reading for this course, these books and articles are highly recommended. 

John H. Arnold, “The Historian as Inquisitor: The Ethics of interrogating subaltern voices”, Rethinking History, 2:3 (1998)

Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (2013)

Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (2016)

Francoise N. Hamlin, “Historians and Ethics: Finding Anne Moody”, American Historical Review (2020)

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe 26 (2008)

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)

Julia Laite, “The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age”, Journal of Social History 53:4 (2020)

Julia Laite, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice (2021)

Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography”, The Journal of American History, 88:1 (2001)

Alison Light, Common People (2014)

Tiya Miles, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021)

Julie Myerson, Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (2004)

Hans Renders and Haan, Binne De, Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Brill, 2014)

Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019)

Carolyn Steedman, “On Not Writing Biography”, New Formations 67 (2009)

Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2002)

Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007)

Emily West, “Reflections on the History and Historians of the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves: Enslaved Women and Intimate Partner Sexual Violence”, American Nineteenth Century History 19:1 (2008)

Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1997)