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Oral history and historical biography: best of both worlds?

Publication |
2023

Abstract

In my paper, I would like to share my personal experience of having written two biographical works, both fully or partly dependent on oral history, and focus on their epistemological similarities on one hand and the disadvantages on the other. In the emerging field of Biography Studies, oral history is often seen as one of the methods of historiographical scholarship with the largest potential - along with ego-documents - to communicate the historical actor's perspective, yet biographers usually prefer not to use it.

In Oral History, we also tend to focus on the subjectivity of our narrators, yet books with a single narrator's name on the cover are quite rare. That is why I will try to overlap these two "worlds" and propose answers on why that might be so and if or how we might want to change it in the future.