Roundtable 1: The historian as storyteller needs to unsettle academic orthodoxies, not only to connect with broader audiences but also to access a wider range of truths. In this first session, speakers will reflect on pervasive (popular) myths about history and history-writing, and discuss how creative nonfiction helps to dismantle these myths. It allows scholars both access to new forms and genres of storytelling as well as insights and sources typically excluded by the profession, such as those of personal experience and memory.

Questions asked will include: how do imagined audiences shape the imperatives that guide our work, and inform decisions about additional glossing needed concerning people and subjects that have not traditionally been deemed to merit coverage in historical works? How can we effectively balance general audiences’ points of departure with the need to introduce them to new kinds of historical actors, perspectives, and arguments? When writing about marginalized figures and themes, how might scholars balance giving audiences what they currently expect or want to read about with what they need but may not consider to be important or relevant to understanding the past? What role can creative nonfiction play in shifting public norms about fixed boulders of history - about what counts as important events, and whose lives are deemed to constitute history?