Doing Justice to Experience: Relations to the Difficult Past in History and Memory

What role should witness accounts and collective memory have in professional historical research? The main objective of the present research project is to solve this question. For this task, the project will offer two connected innovations in historical theory. These innovations are: (i) a theoretical account that shows how, and to what extent, the experiential dimension that witness accounts offer can be incorporated in historical modes of understanding the past, and (ii) a new understanding of the authority of historical research that gives legitimacy to the historian’s role as a memory critic. The project offers, on the one hand, a deeper understanding of the proper ways in which testimony and memory have a valid role to play in historical research, and, on the other hand, theoretical tools for defending the authority of historical research in relation to collective memory and witness accounts. Contrary to contemporary work in the field, the project argues thatto collective memory and witness accounts. Contrary to contemporary work in the field, the project argues that it is only by attending to conceptual distinctions between history and memory that one can correctly appreciate the proper role of memory and testimony in historical research.