Lives and spaces: The scale of biography     — Australian Historical Association annual conference hosted by The Australian National University

Lives and spaces: The scale of biography     (195)

Jennifer McLaren

The claim of microhistory as a historical method is that ‘in studies of particular moments, or other small communities…we often find larger worlds revealed to us.’ (Andy Wood, 2016) The same claim is often made of biography. But how does the historian access and evoke those worlds, and make an argument about the past? This paper considers the possibilities of combining spatial analysis with biography. Using examples drawn from a thesis on Irish sojourners in the Caribbean, this paper will trace the way that the physical spaces the sojourners inhabited, the networks and exchanges they created, and the internal spaces of ideas and emotions provide insights into the world in which they lived, and their experience of empire.

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