Newsletter 1/2025
Newsletter 1/2025
We are happy to present you with the first newsletter in 2025, in which we will share the latest developments in research and academic life in the field of egodocuments.
Network News
International Egodocumental Network Seminar 1/2025
The first seminar is planned for 5th May 2025 at 17.00 (Warsaw time). The lecturer will be Sylvie Moret Petrini (University of Lausanne), who will present the paper entitled Presentation of the Project Lost Female Diaries (17th-19th Centuries).
Abstract:
In recent years, researchers and archive professionals have been working hard to highlight the importance of women’s written heritage, which is naturally a crucial step toward a more balanced and critical historical perspective in terms of gender. The database project Lost Female Diaries (17th–19th Centuries), which I want to further develop and present at this conference, is part of this effort.
By combining the material history of archives with a gender-based approach, this project seeks to investigate the preservation of women’s diaries in Europe from a new perspective. It will not only examine what has been preserved but also what has disappeared. Starting from the observation that keeping a personal diary has long been a shared social practice, the project is based on the hypothesis that contemporary testimonies—what we call "peripheral writings"—can help provide clues about lost texts. This hypothesis arises from the observation that, for a very long time, the diaries were not necessarily intimate or secret. They were often read by acquaintances, commented on, or even partially or entirely copied.
Furthermore, this project aims to explore the possible reasons of the later destructions and disappearances of these writings, bringing attention to texts that have survived only as published excerpts in the works of historians over the past two centuries.
In the first phase of the project, which has already started in Switzerland, we gathered information in a database. We now wish to expand the project on a larger scale and transform this database into a shared tool, allowing researchers to contribute by reporting similar writings they discover in their own research. This would significantly expand the record of women’s diaries and enhance our understanding of personal writing practices, the relationship of women writers to these practices, and family and public archiving culture.
About the lecturer:
Sylvie Moret Petrini (ORCID : 0000-0001-5639-1571) is a lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Lausanne and a scientific manager of the Swiss Egodocuments Database (www.egodocuments.ch). During her PhD, she studied domestic practices of education. Her research was based on the rich Swiss Family archive, which contained a large number of different egodocuments. She contextualized the birth and developpement of educational diaries across different regions and analysed their contribution to the history of the training of both male and female elites.
An important part of her research on the field of egodocuments focuses on children’s and youth’s personal writings (diaries and correspondence). This form of history, from a child’s point of view, has proven to be highly significant. It puts the spotlight on individuals who were seeking visibility and allows an exploration of their agency. Her work places a particular emphasis on female “voices” working on a large corpus of women’s diaries. Among her publications and editions related to this field: L’enfance sous la plume : La diffusion de l’écriture éducative en Suisse romande, 1750-1820, PUR, 2022 (https://books.openedition.org/pur/159297?lang=fr) ; « Child-Rearing and Domestic Education in the 18th century elites », in Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger (eds), The Routledge History of Domestic Sphere in Europe (16th to 19th century), Routledge, 2020 ; Moret Petrini Sylvie et Lanz Anne-Marie (éds), « Il faut que vous deveniez un homme ». Correspondance échangée entre Catherine de Charrière de Sévery et son fils Wilhelm, pensionnaire à Colmar (1780-1783), Antipodes, 2021, « Entre passé et avenir ? Le temps de la jeunesse dans les journaux des jeunes gens au XVIIIe siècle », Annales de démographie historique, 2023.
1st International Egodocumental Network Conference Egodocuments from Medieval Codex to Modern Media: Narratives, Presentations, Identities Vilnius, 24-26 April 2025
We are happy to announce that we are finishing the conference program. We will send it to the participants and our members at the end of March or early April.
International Egodocumental Network (IEN) News
- We encourage you to share information about the Network with your colleagues who may be interested in our work
- We remind you of two publication avenues for egodocumental research in the Brill series Egodocuments and History and in Studies in the History of Privacy (which also allows smaller publications in the form of minigraphs of 30-60,000 words).
Information about network members
A gentle reminder to those who want to publish their research profile on the Network’s website to facilitate communication and interconnection – please fill out the attached form and send it back to us. It will also be published on https://egodocuments.umk.pl/. The attached template includes last and first name, academic title and position, affiliation, period of interest, keywords, remarks, and e-mail. It also comprises the GDPR statement, which must be completed to publish the information online. If you are interested in publishing your profile on our website, please send us back a signed scan of the template to e-mail: egodocuments@umk.pl.
Other News
Conference announcement
- 10th International Research Conference 'Faces Of War', June 5-6, 2025, University Of Łódź
Ladies and Gentleman
We invite you to participate in the tenth, jubilee conference of the Faces of War series, which will traditionally take place at the Institute of History at the University of Łódź and online on June 5-6, 2025. This year, we plan to dedicate the conference to the theme of War and Memory.
War, as an individual and collective experience, as well as an element of political, historical, and cultural narratives, is inextricably linked to memory and various forms of commemoration. Among the topics we aim to address at our conference, special attention will be given to the relationship between war, memory, and identity. We also seek to discuss the evolution of memory and the creation of related myths and legends. We would appreciate papers that consider the issue of different forms of memory—ranging from individual experiences to the perspectives of social, political, and national groups. Additionally, we welcome presentations analyzing various examples of referencing war experiences through illustrations and forms of commemoration. For this reason, works of literature, architecture, visual arts, film, and others, which serve as tools for shaping the perception of historical conflicts, are also interesting.
We hope that the conference will provide a forum for presenting previously unknown sources: historical, archaeological, and others, along with new interpretations of texts and artifacts that have already been the subject of research. We also draw attention to the challenges of documenting contemporary conflicts, including verifying the credibility and archiving materials that are mass-produced during such events.
We would like to highlight the role of places of memory, such as architectural monuments, museums, memorials, and cemeteries. During the conference, topics related to processes of reconciliation and the impact of memory politics on historical and social narratives and international relations may also be addressed.
Our participants will include scholars from various fields who study different cultures and epochs—from antiquity to contemporary times. Please refer to the list of suggested topics below; however, other themes related to the conference's overarching research issue are also welcome.
We anticipate the publication of post-conference proceedings by the University of Łódź Press, which will contain articles that receive positive reviews.
- XXIV Balcanicum Conference: Greeks and Greece in the politics and culture of Southeast Europe, 24-25 October 2025, Poznań, Poland
In the attachment to the newsletter, we are sending detailed information about the Balcanicum Conference organized by the Polish Academy of Science and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.
Publications:
We want to inform you about the publication of our colleagues.
- Nataliia Voloshkova: Writing Travelogues in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Story Behind Mary Holderness's Travel Account of Journeying from Riga to Crimea Via Kyiv, „Ukrainian Historical Review,” III, 2024, pp. 117-141. An open-access article can be found here: https://uhr.ucu.edu.ua/index.php/chasopys/article/view/61.
- Andrzej Czyżewski: The experience of the “anti-Zionist campaign” from the autobiographical perspective of its victims, “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej”, 14, 2024, 210-241. An open-access article can be found here: https://wrhm.pl/index.php/wrhm/article/view/396.
As always, we look forward to your information about any publication, grant, conference, workshop, search for collaborators, or any other information or request you would like to share with the network members. Please send us a description (in English) and materials to egodocuments@umk.pl. We will be pleased to share them with the network.
Best wishes,
Egodocumental Research Group/International Egodocumental Network
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