And yet more terrific news! HCIH member Elise Garritzen has been granted an Academy of Finland Fellowship.
Many congratulations to her!!
Elise will be researching: Diagnosing Archive Fever: Historians, Archive Research, and the Changing Middle-Class Culture c. 1840–1914
The project re-examines the origins and use of the widely circulated nineteenth-century myth of a heroic historian. By combining in an unconventional fashion historiography, cultural history, and archive history the project explores how historians used the myth of an unyielding archive researcher for consolidating the traditional values of gender, professionalism, and publicity that modernity seemed to threaten. So far the nineteenth-century archive discourse has been considered mostly in scholarly terms, but by placing it into a broader context of middle-class culture the project offers a novel interpretation of how educated men used narrative accounts of occupational practices for defending their cultural and social status. The project uses as a case study the archive accounts historians from Northern, Western, and Central Europe wrote about the Spanish Archivo general de Simancas, an attractive yet elusive destination to historians due to its remoteness and assumed backwardness.