ABSTRACT This article examines historians’ multifaceted engagement with the concept of presentism. Traditionally associated with distortive historical practice, presentism has, in recent decades, been increasingly subjected to a more ambivalent discourse – one attentive not only to its shortcomings and fallacies but also to its merits and productive potential. The article argues that fully accommodating this polyvalent discourse requires framing presentism through the lens of present-centeredness, enabling a reading across both ‘vicious’ and ‘virtuous’ conceptualizations of the term. By elaborating on four iterations – motivational, narrative, strategic and pluralist presentism – the article brings to light the stakes of reassessing the long-standing hostility toward presentism. In addition to justifying historians’ use of conceptual and analytical resources not rooted in the past, exploring legitimate forms of presentism helps articulate history’s value and contribution amid present-day concerns and predicaments. However, within a broader historical culture, these efforts remain contested and constrained by alternative historical engagements not bound by the strict present–past dichotomy characteristic of professional history. Therefore, a proper assessment of historians’ preoccupation with presentism requires a dialogue with contemporary theories of historical time and temporality, as developed in this article through the discussion of two illustrative examples.

ABSTRACT In the past years, there has been growing attention, in Europe and beyond, for issues related to accountability for, and recognition of, (post-)colonial violence and its enduring effects, as well as more fundamental debates about the need for societal change. As former colonial powers are increasingly facing pressures to redress enduring injustices related to their colonial legacies, an oft-used response to these demands has been the creation of the creation of a range of initiatives dealing with the ramifications of colonial legacies aimed at truth-seeking and at fostering broader forms of accountability. The contributors to this Special Issue were part of a symposium organized in September 2022, in which the participants discussed whether and through which mechanisms historical truth-seeking processes and accountability initiatives can contribute to the objective of social change. Through six empirical case studies of truth and accountability initiatives related to colonial legacies in the European context (Belgium, Germany, Greenland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain), a conceptual introduction and one reflective piece, the Special Issue explores the ways in which the pursuit of historical truth can contribute to accountability for (post-)colonial harm and eventually social change. This empirical exercise is the basis for exploring, destabilizing and reconstructing the relationship between these notions at a conceptual level.

ABSTRACT This article comparatively examines the documentaries In Search of My Roots (2021) and Resilient Souls: Stories of Spanish Muslims (2023). These documentaries problematize dominant narratives about Islam’s presence in Spain through documenting journeys of rediscovery and spiritual transformation. In Search for My Roots uses the first-person investigative mode to unearth the protracted legacy of the Moriscos, whereas Resilient Souls sheds light on contemporary Spanish converts to Islam and their communities. Both documentaries reimagine Muslim identity not as being imported and external, but rather as intimately woven in the Spanish cultural fabric. Through bringing these documentaries into discussion, this article examines how they both negotiate and problematize questions of historical erasure, Islamic heritage, and embodied faith through different documentary strategies such as on-location interviews, archival retrieval, participatory observation, and autobiographical voiceover. Drawing on documentary and memory studies, this article argues that these films reconstruct overlooked genealogies of Muslim belonging and challenge persistent notions of cultural purity. They provide a vision of Spain as historically and presently plural. The article positions these documentaries as interventions into Spain’s ongoing struggle with its Islamic past and the visibility of its Muslim present, and as contributions to a broader reimagining of European identity in the 21st century.

ABSTRACT In this practice-based contribution, using a language more poetic than academic, I discuss my drawings that reimagine found material – prints, drawings or photographs – and reflect on how historical images can be transformed, in a process both alchemical and mysterious, into personal stories or commentaries on contemporary life and politics. The Museum of London invited me to collaborate with their prints and drawings archives after seeing my exhibition Remember Me, commemorating architectural transition at King’s Cross (Guardian Media, London). Researching in their Archives, I chose urban figurative prints of King’s Cross and St Pancras, depicting ghosts, graveyards, death, health spas, foundling children and the built environment. Using these as starting points for my own stories about the passing of time, while erasing and re-drawing theirs, I became fascinated by a sense of walking in the earlier artists’ footsteps. This led to my exhibition Present in the Past, 2015 (Collyer Bristow, London, 2015). Photographic sources then replaced engravings as source material for Feet of Angels (Carey Blyth, Oxford, 2023), using mostly Fox Talbot photographs from the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné, Bodleian Libraries. This exhibition, while still exploring time and memory, used these historical photographs as a conduit to new narratives of war, dystopia and mortality.

ABSTRACT Postsecularity has emerged as one of the most challenging questions in the theory of history. However, it has thus far been marginalized by both historians and theorists of history. Maxwell Kennel’s book, Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time, offers a significant contribution to this subject, despite the fact that the author is neither an historian nor a theorist of history, but rather a political theologian. In this review essay, I examine Kennel’s reflections from the perspective of the theory of history. Here, ‘postsecular history’ may be understood as a critical engagement with dominant conceptions of time and history as shaped by the framework of secular modernity. For example, Kennel considers periodization as a ‘theopolitical’ act. Another interesting question is his use of concepts such as ‘mediation’ and ‘waiting’, especially in relation to the question of ‘figural thinking’. Kennel expands the domain of faith in historical thinking in order to loosen up fixed categories of time and history. On the one hand, faith seems to be a sufficient motivation for criticism using conceptual parables or figures. On the other hand, the question of its potential as a driving force for making history remains open.

ABSTRACT In this exchange, Gregory Jones-Katz and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht consider Gumbrecht’s oeuvre and the ways his two new books foreground our post-historical existentialist condition, opening political (Marxian-materialist) possibilities for deploying spatially-oriented studies of the past. In his new book on the voice, for instance, Gumbrecht crafts the presence-based concept ‘the “knot of the voice”’ to unearth the voice’s tangible and material effects as well as engage the voice’s place in the past. In his in-progress Intellektuelle Autobiografie, Gumbrecht also uses a spatially oriented concept, that of an ‘Archipelago of Islands of Thought’, to narrate how the Geist—the Hegelian idea of the collective consciousness of Absolute Spirit—materialized at specific locations on three continents, shaping the interpretive horizon of his existence. Gumbrecht’s spatially based historicizations of his/the past have far-reaching consequences for the field of historical theory and practice: his condensation of the chronology of his life into particular places serves a model for how to write a non-hierarchized story, a presence-grounded narrative of the Geist, serviceable for historians (and humanists) in various present-day settings and situations.

ABSTRACT This article argues that some academic historians should experiment with written genres beyond the conventions of historical prose. To begin, I pose a list of 36 written genres, both fictive and nonfictive, that academic historians do not typically use but could. Next, I discuss some recent approaches to thinking about historical writing that, despite their many merits, bump into limits in imagining what certain genres can offer to academic historians. From there, I elaborate my thesis: that experiments with written genres can open up affordances of historical data that the conventions of historical prose cannot. Along the way, I offer a definition of history that embraces an array of genres and mediums, draw on the theory of affordances as explained by literary critic Caroline Levine, and think through an example – an historical datum about Margaret Garner and how different writers have used it. From there, I try to loosen the knotted association between historical truth and the conventions of historical prose, arguing that historical truth is compatible with a variety of written genres. I close with a remark on readers.

ABSTRACT This graphic research paper contributes to wider debates about creative practice as a form of historical research. While much has been written on how visual culture – film, comics, video games, theatre, fine art – can offer complex portrayals of the past, there remains a disconnect between appreciating art/design as an inventive form of representation and valuing creative practice as academic historical research in its own right. Drawing on formal and stylistic techniques discussed in comics and ‘comics- based research’ studies, we present an interrogation of the ways in which creative practitioners engage with documents, artefacts and, indeed, more philosophical debates on the nature of history. Told as an imagined dialogue between a historian and an artist, our narrative overflows with historical references, informed speculations (what Natalie Zemon Davies called ‘possible truths’), metaphors, symbolic juxtapositions and temporal leaps. We encourage readers to engage with text and image as two separate narratives, with the latter often expanding the argument beyond the former’s more straightforward exposition. Extensive, explanatory endnotes conclude our paper, but, as we argue, any individual reading could elicit different interpretations, with readers devising their own meanings and filling in the gaps.

ABSTRACT Creative practice research sits on a fascinating, albeit sometimes challenging, border between research (understood as knowledge production) and creative practice (individual ways to express oneself using artistic methods). An exciting journey as it is, it sometimes results in confused identities of the makers and, potentially, misaligned expectations of the audiences. Not adhering to existing templates, creative practice research requires a slightly more rebellious approach to achieve its goals and remain genuine. This Collaborative Creative Experimental Provocation is driven by a manifesto that emerged out of the main author’s own challenges, both as a maker and supporter (examiner/supervisor/mentor) of practice research projects across creative disciplines: To guarantee their place in academia, creative practice researchers need to make new rules by breaking the rules. The legitimacy of creative practice research is possible due to the consistent rebellious acts of those involved. To be a rebel means to know your direction and be able to tell helpful structures from limiting restrictions and inadequate rules. To be a rebel means to strive for what matters regardless of expectations. It expresses the strong need to do what’s right instead of perpetuating limiting or unhelpful strategies that traditionally dictate what research should be (and how), and as such, it defines the scope of being ‘rebellious’. It considers creative practice research, understood as research where creative practice is essential to achieving the projected objectives. This paper explores the potential of creative practice research, not only for historians but everyone interested in the non-verbal communication potential that can be applied to multiple disciplines and scenarios.

ABSTRACT Responding to the view that pastiche is an empty and inert practice, this project explores whether pastiche historical dialogue can elicit reflective and affective responses. Besieged, a pastiche of a typical play of the 1640s, chronicles the historical events of the Siege of Portsmouth in 1642. It was performed in Portsmouth’s Square Tower, itself part of the historical action, and a questionnaire was used to gauge audience reaction to the dialogue, plot, characters and historical setting. The practice research methodology was influenced by the work of Robin Nelson as demonstrated in the dialogue created between the play as artefact, the audience response and theoretical debates. The nature of the pastiche is discussed, and the view developed that it must have agency given that the context of its use must always make it more than a copy of the referent. The history play and audience response theory are explored, and the audience feedback is analysed, revealing a wealth of imaginative responses to the language, style and themes of the play. The questionnaire provoked a range of positive and negative reactions, and the conclusion suggests that pastiche can have agency when it is balanced carefully with accessibility.