Situating Yourself in Projects of Historical Inquiry

In fact, I suggest that we seek out and celebrate the role that our emotions play in our selection of research projects. IN the process of writing my dissertation, my book, and, most recently, this article, I've been focusing on "acknowledging" the part of my emotions and experiences played in the construction of my research agenda. The focus, in other words, has been on making sure that I've responsibly revealed my biases and my locatedness as a researcher. (Sharer, "Traces of the Familiar," p. 54)

Yet my most significant (to date) research project originated within the emotion-laden family and life experiences that preceded that research. Don't these origins, then, deserve celebration rather than brief, and somewhat apologetic, acknowledgement? I want to suggest that, rather than turning away from or hesitating to reveal how research is connected with lived, and often affective, experiences, researchers should seek out these experiences and make them known in a spirit of enthusiasm. (ibid)

I'm simply suggesting that we look favorably on and in fact encourage affective connections to our research projects. I urge researchers not to dismiss the inspirations that they cannot fully articulate as part of a rational effort to locate themselves as researchers. I hope that, by presenting my story, I can foster a desire in future scholars to explore the rhetorical practices of family members and friends and, at the same time, to counteract the restrictions and assumptions that place family and friends--"personal relationships" and the affective domains that surround them--beyond the boundaries of valid research. (ibid, 55)

If conventions of historiography were more conducive to explicating biographical connections between a writer and her topic, we would find that the desire to trace one's own lineage or genealogy fuels many historical projects. (Joann Campbell, "Afterword: Revealing the Ties That Bind" in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, p. 304)

Seeking roots, looking for continuities, assuring ourselves of our place at the table [...] all of these are worthy endeavors (ibid)

To begin answering the question"how did we come to be where we are and not elsewhere?" the historian can, and should, make her own location part of the story (reference is to quote from Adrienne Rich that is above this quote). Historiographers have urged us to do so for several political and academic reasons. The late James Berlin, whose history of nineteenth-century composition practices opened the door and provided a framework within and against which many of us in English studies work, argues that a historian must "make every effort to be aware of the nature of her point of view and its interpretive strategies, and to be candid about them with her reader." Only with such practices, Berlin claims, can historians "honestly present their own political agendas. Those political agendas may be quite personal, such a desire to describe past difficult environments in which women learned to write academic prose in order to understand one's own struggles with writing." (ibid)