Undisciplined History: Creative Methods and Academic Practice

Greg Dening has described history as ‘the past transformed into words or paint or dance or music or play.’ While this work can be undertaken by many practitioners—novelists, narrative historians, playwrights, biographers and memoirists, genealogists, museum professionals and community historians, film-makers, artists and musicians, librarians, teachers, politicians, journalists and the general public—it is academic historians who find themselves most engaged by the actual process of transformation. A substantial body of scholarship now exists about the historical novel, the museum, and other forms of creative and public history. But while keen to write about the practice of others, academic historians often stand in a difficult relationship to it, finding themselves deeply uncomfortable with—and drawn to criticize—history fashioned in the public and creative realms.
And yet all history—in the sense of the work of understanding and representing the past—is creative. The past existed; histories are made.