Key research themes
1. How do New Historians revise and challenge traditional narratives in Israeli-Palestinian historical memory?
This research theme investigates how New Historians, particularly Israeli scholars, have critically re-examined traditional Zionist narratives about key events such as the 1948 Palestinian exodus. It addresses the evolving historical memory within Israeli academia and society, highlighting shifts from dominant Zionist accounts to more critical perspectives that acknowledge Israeli involvement in Palestinian displacement. Understanding these narrative revisions is vital for grasping contested histories, collective memory politics, and the role of historical scholarship in conflict dynamics.
2. What theoretical and methodological innovations define New Historicism in literary and historical studies?
This theme centers on the intellectual origins, conceptual underpinnings, and methodological traits of New Historicism as a critical approach that integrates literary analysis with historical contexts. It explores how New Historians and literary critics like Stephen Greenblatt have combined anthropological, Foucauldian, and comparative methods to study how texts both reflect and participate in power relations, ideology, and cultural practices of their times. This theme illuminates shifts from traditional historical objectivity to more interpretative, interdisciplinary analyses emphasizing the constructed nature of history and literature.
3. How have conceptual and methodological transformations in historiography at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries redefined historical knowledge and narrative?
This research area explores the profound epistemological, methodological, and narrative shifts in historical studies prompted by postmodern critiques, linguistic turns, and interdisciplinary approaches blending history with literary and cultural studies. It assesses debates over objectivity, the constructed nature of historical narratives, and the use of new sources and methods like statistical analysis and literary criticism. The theme underscores how these transformations challenge traditional positivistic historiography, fostering innovative frameworks like cultural history and new social history that reconceptualize the historian’s role and the production of historical knowledge.