This panel asks: What happens when rather than sequestering our personal and familial lives, emotions, and experiences, we bring them to our work as historians? Starting from distinct geographic and temporal subfields of history, this panel highlights possibilities in an ethics of history that embraces the personal, familial, and emotional.

Ada Ferrer’s and Leslie Harris’s papers rest at the intersection of history and memoir. Ferrer draws on her family’s experiences of the dislocations of migration and revolution; Harris draws on her family’s history in New Orleans. But contemporary context and events and personal tragedy also shape the panelists’ work as historians. For Ferrer, the decision to focus on Cuban history became a way to make amends for the fact that her mother left Cuba with her, while leaving behind her 9-year-old brother. For Harris, the sudden recognition with Hurricane Katrina that her family was bound up in and with the history of New Orleans she had been thinking of writing about at the end of her career led her to see her family as part of that history. For Welke, the tragic loss of a child in the midst of professional milestones, refocusing a project about flammable fabrics to focus on the meaning and experience of tragic loss in the course of her subjects’ lives, braided together with a history of the curriculum vitae, in Latin “the course of life”. For Zahra, an unsettling feeling of recognition in the rage around us, leading her to consider a family history marked by rage and how the current political and social history might affect her own future family.

Collectively, the papers raise other questions. All of these papers are about family. They open pathways to who might do history, who and what are subjects of history, and the work that history might do in our lives. The norms of the discipline of history were crafted in an era marked by discrimination and exclusion on axes of (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex. Are these works part of a broader re-norming of the craft and possibilities of history? Are some scholars, by virtue of identity, more likely to embrace the personal in their scholarly lives? With the exception of the commentator, all of the panelists are women. Is there in this work a rebuttal to assertions that “this isn’t history,” an echo of the mantra from the women’s movement of seventy years ago that the personal is political? All of the panelists are also tenured. Among Leslie Harris’s questions is who is allowed to do this kind of work without losing their professional bona fides? Her question might relate to any number of elements of identity and subfield, but among them most certainly is the question of tenure. Might a silver lining of the awful precarity of American academic life be an untethering of constraints that have limited the scope and tools of history?