Cultural History: The State of the Field
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 March 2014) | Viewed by 20298
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In the 1980s, in response to the crisis of social history, advocates of the “New Cultural History” proposed a new paradigm for studying the past. Drawing on the work of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers from a variety of disciplines, new cultural historians analyzed texts, images and practices to identify systems of thought and belief. By the turn of the twentieth century, New Cultural History had reached its own crisis point. Both critics and practitioners expressed concern at a lack of standard definitions and methodology as well as a tendency to focus on representations divorced from social practices. Including cultural history within a larger critique of postmodernism, skeptics and adherents alike asked whether cultural history was able to bring to light any objective “truth” about the past. Yet despite this criticism, cultural history has continued to develop as a distinct approach to the past, as historians turn to new topics (emotions, memory) and draw from diverse disciplines (cultural geography, neurobiology). This special issue asks whether it is possible, twenty-five or so years after the “cultural turn,” to speak of cultural history as a coherent field. Are the criticisms of cultural history made in the late 1990s still valid? How has new technology altered cultural historical approaches? What might we gain by thinking of cultural history as a field, and what might we lose? This special issue asks authors to submit articles based on their own original research that speak to these questions concerning the state of the field.
Dr. Victoria Thompson
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- culture
- cultural history
- New Cultural History
- interdisciplinary
- structuralism
- poststructuralism
- historical methodology
- postmodernism
- thought
- belief
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