Fiction in the Archives: the selection of facts and documents in scientific research
27 March 2023 г. New Conference Hall
Sofia University “S. Kliment Ohridski”
We invite the members of the Bulgarian society for eighteen-century studies to send proposals for this topic, which concerns the level of credibility of use of sources materials containing facts in our research, which always contains a stage of interpretation of the primary material from the time of the European and Balkan Enlightenment . Often the echo of imprecise selection and utilization of facts reverberates later in the critical/historiographical analysis in the next generations of scholars who take the stored information as unequivocally valid. Тhus the mistakes made earlier deepen in the next period of research of a historical event or a personality stretching temporarily from 18th to 21st c. Therefore we seek proposals which not only cover the initial problematic knot but also trace its historiographical echo up to today.
The title of the conference is inspired by the approaches of Natalie Zemon Davis in her book “Fiction in the Archives” (1997) and Giorgio Agamben’ s one “Idea della prosa” (1985), to seek for inbetweenness between „versus” et “prosus”, between fact and fiction in contemporary research. How prone is the scientific study to political movements and dominant ideologies while it also intersects with different areas of humanities and natural sciences?
Deadline for proposals 15 March 2023: bulgc18@gmail.com
