BIOGRAPHY AND MICROHISTORY

What does it mean to enter history through a life? This course will combine the Italian historiographical tradition of microstoria with the global turn in historical studies, in order to explore a series of microhistorical and biographical works. We will look at the biographies of people from the 15th to the 20th centuries who lived their lives on the move between empires and nation states and across continents and seas, and others who never left home but had something interesting to say about how their world went. We will read authors Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Linda Colley, Lucy Riall, Karl Jacoby, M’hamed Oualdi, Rebecca Solnit, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Victoria de Grazia, Javier Cercas, Colm Tóibín, and Lea Ypi, and we will learn about the adventures of a 16th-century French miller and his contemporary Muslim geographer Leo Africanus; an 18th-century Jamaican mixed-race woman who became part of world history; Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “Hero of the Two Worlds”; a 19th-century Texas slave who became a Mexican millionaire, and another who was enslaved as an Ottoman but died as an Italian; a late 1800s California pioneering photographer; an Ottoman Sephardic family through the 20th century; an Italian fascist and his jewish wife; a Spanish impostor who passed himself as a victim of Nazism; the contradictory life of Thomas Mann; and a woman who lived in communist and post-communist Albania. Through the micro-perspective of these individuals, the course will trace some of the big themes of the early modern and modern periods. Students will be invited to reflect on the possibilities opened up by ‘global microhistory’, on the prospects and limits of biography, and on how you can combine narrativity with scholarly argumentation. But, above all, we will enjoy the mere pleasure of reading