There is no history without a story. With this premise in mind, back in 2013, we decided to set up a group whose meeting ground would be the field of history overlapping with literary studies. Since then, having organized four successful international conferences and numerous meetings and workshops, we have grown into a circle of young (and young in spirit) scholars whose research interests revolve around, broadly speaking, the issues lying at the intersection of these two areas, with occasional incursions into historiography, literary history and theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, but also biology and medicine. What connects us, then, are the interests in the ways in which history is narrated, disseminated, gendered, en- and decrypted, re-worked and re-used (as well as abused), and in the ways in which narratives of history can be treated and analysed as literary texts. Put simply, we believe that history is full of good stories and that their meanings not only lie at the heart of various identities and cultures but can also benefit from being juxtaposed with other areas of research.
Research Group at University of Silesia in Katowice