Off Track? Writing About My Family and Our Place in History

In early 2006, I outlined a book that would center myself and my family in the history of my hometown, New Orleans. As an academic historian, I had thought about writing about New Orleans, but I had never considered including my or my family’s personal experience as part of a research project until Hurricane Katrina reframed my consideration of my family and the city. Over the last twenty years of wrestling this project onto the page, I have had to consider how to balance the professional, political and personal aspects of this project; and whether or not I was “off-track” in terms of the career I imagined for myself in graduate school and in the years leading up to tenure at an R1 institution. This paper will discuss these issues, as well as the historiography of such projects: when have other historians written about themselves, and for what reasons; which historians (and perhaps other academics) are allowed to develop such projects without losing their professional bona fides; and why many historians now are turning to such projects.