PAST: SOCIAL HISTORY – NEW DIRECTIONS

Prof. Arlette Farge is a Professor at the Center for historical research, Paris.

She has expanded the meaning of social history and changed it. She engaged in women’s history, urban history, and the history of crime and its policing and control, as well as the history of literacy. Focusing on the margins of society, such as the poor, small artisans, women and children and petty criminals, not only as social groups, but also as individuals, she redefined the craft of social historians and their uses of their sources and archives.

Farge is a creative archives historian. She is a historian of voices and the ways in which “voice becomes an event”, of visual materials and of the interplay between words, images and things. Her book The Allure of the Archives demonstrates the historian’s connections with documents; it is about epistemology and social history of the archives themselves.

Over the course of her productive career, she has published more than 30 books (written or edited), as well as dozens of articles in journals such as Annales: E.S.C.; French Politics, Culture, and Society; Ethnologie Française; and Le Mouvement Social.