Publication Date

November 29, 2010

Perspectives Section

Perspectives Daily

Roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical AssociationHistorians and authors of historical fiction come together in session 156, History and Fiction: Creative Intersections, to discuss researching and writing historical fiction, as well as using fiction and film in the classroom.

This roundtable includes historian Jane Kamensky, who co-authored the novel Blindspot with Jill Lepore, author Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her book March (which tells the story of “the character of the absent father…who has gone off to war,” in Little Women), Donald Ostrowski, a historian of medieval Russia and a teacher who uses fiction and film in class, Joan Neuberger, a historian of Soviet film, and Peter Ho Davies, whose most recent book The Welsh Girl, creates a story about a “WWII POW camp built by the British in the remote mountains of northern Wales and Esther.”

See below for the complete session information, and check out the past four “Session of the Week” posts on the blog, pulled from the content of the Program of the 125th Annual Meeting.

History and Fiction: Creative Intersections
AHA Session 156
Saturday, January 8, 2011: 11:30 AM-1:30 PM
Exeter Room (Marriott Boston Copley Place)

Chair: Joan Neuberger, University of Texas at Austin

Topics: Novel History
Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University

Bringing Out the Dead
Geraldine Brooks, freelance

Factional Fiction: Literature and Cinema in the Writing and Teaching of History
Donald Ostrowski, Harvard University Extension School

Eisenstein’s Books: Ivan the Terrible as History
Joan Neuberger, University of Texas at Austin

Historical Fiction and Fictional History
Peter Ho Davies, University of Michigan

This post first appeared on AHA Today.

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