Masterclass - Biography and Historical Research with Visiting International Fellow Prof Eric D. Weitz, City College of New York.
Prof Eric D. Weitz
Why biography?
Since the 1970s the discipline of history in the Anglophone world has gone through one "turn" after another. Social, linguistic, gender, cultural, spatial – no doubt there are many more one could name. Despite the often-melodramatic claims of its respective advocates, none has provided the essential key to unlocking the past. Because none can. The past, like the present, is complex and no single methodology or theory can ever come close to approaching the meaning of history.
Amid all these turns, biography, except in the form of prosopography, has been largely ignored. It seemed like an antiquated method, too tied to "great white men" forms of history. The formal profession left biography to popular writers. Yet great biographies, sometimes coupled with oral histories, provide a vital lens onto the larger world in which individuals moved.
Prof Weitz's next book project is a biography of Ralph Bunche. Bunche's life sits at the intersection of American and global affairs, and he understood intimately the connection between them. He was deeply involved in the American civil rights movement and decolonization, the latter from his United Nations positions as Director of the Trusteeship Council and then Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs. Bunche's life offers a lens onto the possibilities and limitations of the classic development ideology of the 1950s and 1960s, which combined a belief in national self-determination, economic progress, and human rights. The book will explore Bunche's involvements in the United States, Palestine/Israel, Congo, and Rwanda/Burundi.
For the seminar, Prof Weitz will introduce Bunche's biography and then lead a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the biographical method.
Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished Professor of History and the former Dean of Humanities and Arts at The City College of New York, CUNY. He also teaches at CUNY's Graduate Center. Previously he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota and St. Olaf College. At Minnesota he chaired the History Department and directed the Center for German and European Studies. He held the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts and was Distinguished McKnight University Professor.
Trained in modern German and European history, Weitz also works in international and global history. He is currently completing, A World Divided: A Global History of Nation-States and Human Rights since the Eighteenth Century. His major publications include Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2007; second expanded edition 2013; Weimar Centennial (third) edition 2018); A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (2003; reprint with new foreword 2014), and Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (1997), all with Princeton University Press. Weimar Germany was named an "Editor's Choice" by The New York Times Book Review.
Weitz has been the recipient of many fellowships and awards from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.
Event Information
- Date: This event was held on Friday 8 June 2018
- Location: W-356, Social Sciences Building, Callaghan.
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