On Friday 15 January 2027, the Research Network Theory of History of the Huizinga Institute organises a lecture by Bowen Ran, PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and participant in the PhD Programme of the Huizinga Institute.

Bowen Ran will deliver his lecture ‘Historiographic Activism and the Configuration of Historical Distance’ on 15 January 2027, from 15:00 until 17:00 at the Van Ravensteynzaal, room 1.06, Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, in Utrecht.

Commentator will be Dr Hanco Jürgens, scientific member of the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam and fellow of the Montesquieu Institute in The Hague. The event will be moderated by Maria Grever, Emeritus Professor Theory and Methodology of History and research fellow at NL-Lab of the KNAW Humanities Cluster.

After the lecture, there will be drinks at the same location.

Because of limited seating (20 pers. max) and catering, we kindly ask you to register via this form.
 

Summary Can historiography constitute a form of political engagement? If so, how does it negotiate the tension between epistemic rigor and political efficacy. This paper introduces the concept of historiographic activism and argues for its analytical significance by distinguishing four modes of entanglement between politics and historiography: politics beyond, upon, within, and via historiography. Taking memory activism as a point of reference, it then proposes distance configuration as a framework for understanding historiographic activism. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics and treating historicity as a mediating concept, the paper reconceptualizes distance as a narrative dialectic between historians’ assimilation of their own constructed historicity to that of past occurrences, and their estrangement from it. Finally, it identifies three defining features of this hermeneutic conception of distance, namely its constructive, dialectical, and mediatory character. In this way it demonstrates how these features provide a framework for analyzing the dynamics of engaged historiography, like the work of E.P. Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis.