Event Type: Local / Community

Takes Place: 17th April 2026

Time: 10:00

Venue: St John's College, Oxford

Description: Overview The EHR is hosting a one-day symposium in St John's College, Oxford, to celebrate the recent publication of the journal's 600th issue. In marking this milestone, and in line with the journal's generalist ambitions, the symposium addresses a problem which matters to all historians: what to do when there are no sources. Five leading scholars, working across diverse chronological and geographical areas, will grapple with the methodological problem of paucity of source material, discuss how such absences affect their area of research, and demonstrate how they have chosen to solve the problem. All interested parties, from senior scholars to graduate students, are invited to register to attend via the link on this Eventbrite page. Tickets are free, and lunch is included. Lineup John Arnold, University of Cambridge Hannah Murphy, King's College London Jonathan Saha, Durham University Miranda Spieler, American University of Paris Tess Wingard, University of York Concept note History, as Carlo Ginzburg famously pointed out, is an evidence-based discipline. Historians of all stripes seek sources to reconstruct credibly the actions and thoughts of those who lived in the past, or to identify social, economic, cultural and political trends created by and also affecting small or large collectives. Such sources may be written in many languages and on a variety of materials, they may be painted, woven, etched, reported. But what does the historian do when there are no sources to answer the question that they wish to ask? In many ways, this is a problem that historians have confronted and resolved many times over. Oral history was once proposed as a complement to archival documentation or a substitute for it, in order to offer greater access to personal views, especially of those whose experiences and thoughts left fewer traces in written records. In more recent decades, historians of traumatised and marginalised social groups, such as enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean and United States, have demonstrated the importance and efficacy of imagination and empathy, such that precious surviving objects and texts are treated with not just intense contextualisation, but also generative meditation. The absence of sources does not simply affect history-writing in relation to marginalised or oppressed people, or record-poor societies. It may also affect the historian confronted with an intimidating profusion of sources, none of which can answer, for example, why a certain dictator made certain decisions. We hope that the symposium will promote stimulating conversations about a problem of universal and timeless historical interest.

How to book: https://ehrsymposium600.eventbrite.co.uk

Website: https://ehrsymposium600.eventbrite.co.uk

Region: South-East England