Workshop // 1B 

// Session 1B //
Co-creating history: family history and imperial legacies

Family historians are a large and often neglected group of historical researchers. They have a strongly articulated sense of their practice, and a well-developed set of methodologies and research apparatuses. In recent years, family histories have emerged in a variety of creative forms that include autobiography, biography, and memoir. Several of these are focussed on the history of crime. In this workshop we encourage researchers to engage with assumptions around family history and explore the diverse ways in which scholars, writers and others are engaging with family history and the history of crime. We ask them to consider how family history is enabling growing numbers of people to think historically and to produce distinctive forms of historical understanding that challenge the long-standing academic monopoly of historical knowledge. 

In this workshop we aim to bring together a range of scholars at different career stages to hear about their research, the methods they have used and its impact. These scholars include those who have worked on family histories or with family historians and those in conversation with family historians. We hope to reveal the many benefits that can emerge from collaboration between practitioners within and outside of the academy.

About the Convenors

Associate Professor Tanya Evans is Director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches public history and modern history. Her books include Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (Bloomsbury, 2022), Making Histories (De Gruyter, 2020), with Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton (as co-eds), the prize-winning Fractured Families: Life On The Margins in Colonial New South Wales (New South, 2015); Swimming with the Spit, 100 Years of the Spit Amateur Swimming Club (New South, 2016); with Pat Thane, Sinners, Scroungers, Saints: Unmarried Motherhood in Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012) and 'Unfortunate Objects': Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). She has also written many journal articles and book chapters on family history.

Dr Aoife O Connor is Programme Manager at genealogy website Findmypast. Aoife received her PhD from Sheffield University in 2021 with a thesis entitled: An Ancestor in Crime: Digitisation and the Discovery of Family Deviance. Her work looks at how digitisation has impacted the ways in which family historians interact with archival material. Having worked in the GLAM, commercial and academic sectors Aoife’s work offers a fresh perspective on the practices of grassroots historians and their interactions with a variety of knowledge providers.