In historical writing; memoir, autobiography, oral history, and other such subjective primary sources and ‘self-histories’ very often serve as an important well from which historians draw critical information and construct complex and highly nuanced visions of the past. However, how much of this information is reliable and accurate, and represents the ‘true’ nature of the past, and how much represents the potential biases on the part of the subject? That is, how does morality interact with memory, and how can we be sure that these memories are reliable?
My work aims to discuss the manner in which historical memory is formed and recorded, as well as how it evolves over time through complex interaction between the changing social, political, economic, and technological circumstances.