ABSTRACT
To someone, like most academics, who has been used to addressing an audience through the medium of scholarly work, the invitation to talk about myself as a historian is a novelty and a challenge. One does not need the postmodernist dictum of the death of the author to acknowledge that one’s work has a life of its own, outside one’s control. Similarly, to talk about my formation as a historian involves an account which I am well aware is not only partial, but also blind to a good deal of what has shaped this formation, as well as the work itself. As a student of ‘social narrative’, I have some understanding of the significance of narrative in giving structure to our experience. The kind of narrative I have chosen should not be understood as leaving out of the account the community of scholars, at all levels and especially historians, who along with the other influences I discuss have formed me, no doubt in equally unknown ways. If not always explicit in the account that follows (my narrative could
have been concerned more with the history of the history discipline) this community is certainly implicit, in my interest in the nature of what it practises. However, as a student of narrative I am also aware that our narratives choose us rather more than we choose them, and recognizing the way in which all history writing is situated in space and time, something is hopefully to be gained by situating myself as best I can in this manner, by presenting a narrative that seems to have chosen me. Such an exercise recognizes that the historian is no longer simply a mirror to the past but now himself or herself actively a ‘site of memory’, as Pierre Nora has put it (Nora 1996: 13).
