Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which method of doing history is currently the most under-practiced and underrated? So, you might’ve said a while ago, well, material culture. Maybe that’s not true anymore, but it once was. Weirdly, right now, I would say that one of the ones that’s most undervalued is biography, unfortunately, partly because biography was a very fashionable genre in the 19th century and very early 20th century, and so as a reaction against it, it’s been pushed away. But also because biography is one of few arenas of history in which you can make a living actually writing biographies and people will buy them in Barnes & Noble, recreationally, to read. They’re one of the things you can live on. That means that, especially in the middle of the 20th century, they were and still are disproportionately written by women because more women don’t manage to make a living within the academic world than men. So, biography has come to be an almost gendered practice of history, associated with those women who got pushed out of the academy and are trying to support themselves as scholars independently. That has meant that there’s been a move away from respecting biography as a practice. But one of the really powerful things biography does is cut across moments when we draw a line, right? We talk a lot about when does the Renaissance end and the Baroque period begin? When does the Middle Ages end and another thing begin? Then you do a biography of somebody like Titian who lives into his 90s, and you realize there was no line. He lived through three different places where we would draw a line. We often forget that people who lived through one thing are still alive for the next unless we approach them beginning to end through the art of biography. Whose biography will you write?…

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