The Seventh Annual HEX Conference: Historicizing Experiences

The history of experiences is a burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of study that sets out to comprehend the manifold roles and meanings of experience in history. It charts the dynamic interplay between the individual, community, and society at large. The history of experiences reconsiders how experience is defined and used as a key element of historiographical practice. Historians of experience highlight the generative role of experience in shaping history and its vital importance to any comprehensive historical analysis. Rather than as an isolated, extraneous facet of historical study, experience is most fruitfully studied as situated within social structures and institutions, with which it is in constant interaction. Experience is deeply intertwined with the fabric of culture, and understanding cultural change requires examining experience within its context. Historians of experience constantly develop the approaches and concepts central to their field. They interrogate the specificities of their domain and self-reflectively ask how it is situated in the wider historiographical context. New sources help unravel the multilayered historicity of experience.

Within this framework, the seventh annual HEX Conference will reassess the premises on which this field rests and consider what historicizing experience entails. How is experience produced, and why is it crucial to understand it as a historical process?

For more information visit the conference www-pages.