Fiction, Archives and Histories from Below - HIS00183M

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Module summary

History from below has been a central part of the appearance and growth of social history over the past half century and is one of the most important developments within the historical discipline. Aiming to acknowledge the historical experiences and agency of men and women who were long excluded from the historical record, practitioners of history from below have not only explored the experiences of a wide array of actors but have also proposed novel ways of constructing historical accounts and challenging the silences and omissions inherent in the archive. "Fiction, Archives and Histories from Below” introduces students to a broad range of approaches, methodologies, and key issues within the historiographical approach, and invites them to reassess and interrogate the different ways historians construct their narratives. We explore the role of fiction and narrative in historical research and writing, as well as the strategies that social and cultural historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have employed to engage with the past and to approach "the archive" in creative and innovative ways. The module will also question how historians have addressed the absence of "evidence" within the archive and how they have challenged the inequalities, violence, and power relations that permeate it.

To explore these themes, we will explore a rich array of case studies across various historical periods, including studies of sixteenth-century French pardon tales, marginal travelers and bureaucrats in seventeenth-century imperial geographies, document-making practices in colonial Peru, and the formation of imperial archival epistemologies in nineteenth-century Indonesia. We will also examine how scholars have narrated intimate stories of transatlantic crossings—from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean; New Zealand to Britain and Argentina; and China and India to South America—focusing on studies of enslaved people and indentured labourers.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 1 2025-26

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

• Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
• Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
• Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
• Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

1. Many ways to tell a story: History from below, microhistory and other forms of historical inquiry
2. Fictions in the Archives
3. Power in the Archives
4. Impossible stories, fragmented archives
5. Enslaved bodies and the violence of the archive
6. Fiction, Biography, Global Microhistory
7. Intimate histories
8. Forgotten stories, untold stories

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

• For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:
• Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved women, Violence, and the Archive. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Ann Laura Stoler. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, 2010.
• Mariza Lasso. Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal. Harvard University Press, 2019.