Roundtable: Family (Hi)Stories
- Date: Thursday 20 March 2025, 11:00 – 13:00
- Location: University of Leeds
- Cost: Free. <a href="https://forms.office.com/e/06i9kXPpjr">Registration required</a>.
Researching families’ histories is a simultaneously tricky and rewarding business.
Accessing the lives of families in the past is difficult. How do we get at those intimate spaces? But through working with genealogical records, families’ own archives, and our own personal family histories, there are opportunities here.
Family pasts can be a way to create radical histories, to raise questions and to problematise – unsettling ideas of race, gender identity, sexuality, for example. Families don’t fit within the usual borders of nation, or within the chronologies that dominate academic history. A focus on families encourages to work in inter-disciplinary ways too, and has invited creative and experimental research methodologies and ways of writing.
Through this roundtable, a range of speakers will explore such questions, thinking through the global nature of families and the ways we might seek to share those through written forms.
Speakers
Charles Fox
Hidden is a result of a long-term dialogue between photographer and researcher Charles Fox with one Cambodian family. The project and resulting book explore the journey that the family made through the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) landscape carrying over 90 family photographs, concealed for safety. As part of the work, the family recreated their journey and wrote about their experiences during the Khmer Rouge. This writing forms a major part of the book, alongside concealed elements of the photographs in response to the absence of photography through shifting political complications.
Julia Laite
Julia Laite’s new work examines the long history of her English and Irish family on the Island of Newfoundland, alongside the story of Indigenous Beothuk families who were dispossessed by the hyper-exploitation of the island’s natural world and by colonial settlement. The project seeks to use family history to complicate stories of settler colonialism, and to address the difficult legacies of empire.
Lizzie Oliver
Dr Lizzie Oliver is currently grappling with what it means to be the steward of family archives. Her first book, Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway: Narratives of History and Memory (Bloomsbury, 2019), explores the life-writing of prisoners of war and transgenerational responses to captivity across South East Asia during the Second World War.
Jay Prosser
As Professor in Humanities at the University of Leeds, Jay Prosser is driven by how we can connect personal stories with cultural history, in order to answer some of the big questions of our time. His latest book, Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns, was winner of BIO's 2020 Hazel Rowley Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 Tony Lothian Prize, and is now widely available.
Mike Roper
Michael’s recent book Afterlives of War: A Descendant’s History (Manchester University Press, 2023) is concerned with the histories of the First World War that descendants grow up amidst, and the histories that they themselves create. Based on the author’s own past as the grandson of an Australian veteran and war worker, and research with descendants in the UK and Germany, it investigates the affective and material traces of the First World War past in families today, and their motivations for history-making.
Laura King
Laura King is Professor of Collaborative History at the University of Leeds, and has been working out new methodologies for collaboration with family historians as part of a project on remembrance of the dead and the passing on of family stories in modern Britain. Her new book from this work, Living with the Dead: Memories, Histories, and the Stories Families Tell in Modern Britain, has been recently published with Oxford University Press (2025).
How to attend
Registration is required. Please register via this Microsoft Form (no Microsoft account required).
This roundtable will be held in room G.02 of the Sir William Henry Bragg Building.
As this event will be held over lunchtime, you are welcome to bring a packed lunch with you.
Image credit
Image courtesy Laura King.