Long Histories

In my conferencing week, I attended AVSA and ANZAMEMS: from medieval and early modern studies in Adelaide to Victorian studies in Perth. It isn't the world's most obvious cross-over (I've heard of this thing - the eighteenth century - that might sit in the middle), and timing-wise, it wasn't easy. The conferences ran at basically the same dates, so I left ANZAMEMS early and only had a day at AVSA.

As a result of this conference juggling, I've been reflecting on long histories and the crossing of temporal boundaries. Long histories, which range over traditional boundaries of periodisation and attempt to unsettle such markers, offer a rich mode of engagement with the past: they require an engagement with historicism and historiography. To research, think and argue in terms of long histories not only requires a deep and sustained knowledge of the past, it also needs a critical awareness of the terms on which we frame and study these pasts. This can produce complex and innovative research as well as highly competent researchers.

Nonetheless, working in terms of long histories, especially as a postgraduate, can be a challenge. The push to define research topics early, to avoid sidetracks and tangents in favour of timely completion can lead to narrow specialisation that forecloses such possibilities. Working across boundaries of periodisation is assisted by academic environments where staff are supportive of such enterprises and, indeed, where there there simply are enough staff with a wide enough range of expertise to sustain and supervise this kind of work.

What was exciting for me, at both conference, was to see and hear people working in this way: where the necessarily tight focus of the conference paper format was informed by a broader awareness of the location of the subject matter and an explicitly critical awareness of how the past, periodisation and temporality is constructed. 

My conference papers, on medievalism as a visual trope in Victorian photography, were informed by my interest in long histories, representations of the past and understandings of temporality. I don't know if I succeeded in pulling together all the layers of my argument: analysis of the photographs themselves (such as Henry Peach Robinson's The Lady of Shalott, 1861, detail above), the claim that such photographs unsettled emergent ways of understanding photography through the conjuntion of artifice and presence, and the possible implications for the fields of Victorian, medievalism and media studies. (On reflection, probably not - that's a lot to get through!). Here's a sample of the paper:

As obvious fictions and reproduced histories, Victorian medievalist photographs literally display a paradoxical relationship to the past: they offer a complex vision of temporality that is marked by contemporary novelty and desire for representations of the past under a realist banner. The colonisation of the new medium of photography by medievalist images raises questions of how to read the originality and the desire for origins inherent in new forms of media.

What am I trying to say here? Firstly, that I think long histories offer a very useful framework for generating new research, analysis and theory. Secondly, that if the first is true, then universities and disciplines need to find ways to support researchers in using this approach. If all else fails, pretty pictures are good.