HUMS (the Humanities, Medicine and Sciences Platform at the University of Malta) has been organising symposia and other events exploring interdisciplinary practice and potentials since its foundation in 2012. In its next event, HUMS turns its attentions to an immemorial and ever fascinating interdisciplinary relation: that between history and literature.
Committed, in contrasting yet complementary ways, to the lure of narrative and the calls and guises of truth, the discourses of history and literature bring into play the symbioses – and tensions – across attestable fact and the work of re-vision, retelling, reinterpretation, reimagination. Stories Are Us: When History and Literature Meet, HUMS’ next symposium, draws together six scholars who will present reflections on some of the questions arising around that relation.
The event, chaired by HUMS Coordinator Prof. Clare Vassallo, presents the speakers – Prof. Dominic Fenech, Prof. Ivan Callus, Prof. Emanuel Buttigieg, Dr Daniel Vella, Prof. Maria Frendo and Prof. Immanuel Mifsud – who will each offer personal as well as academic takes on the theme. As the brief abstracts show, the presentations are diverse and wide-ranging. One idea, however, might be said to unite them. It would not do to anticipate history and literature, or to foretell how they might encounter each other (or not): and yet, have we ever stopped doing so, and is not that continuity one of the ways in which ‘stories are us’? A timely, even overdue, Symposium then – to be held at the Aula Magna in Valletta on 19 February at 18:00.
HUMS Coordinator and a founder member of the HUMS Platform. With a background in Literature, Philosophy, Semiotics, Translation Studies and an interest in Science Fiction, the blending of disciplinary boundaries is fundamental to her understanding of the nature of knowledge.
Dominic Fenech: “When Clio met Calliope”
Brief Abstract: History and literature interact in many ways and on many planes. This presentation follows the various genres—the historical novel, counterfactual history, counterfactual science fiction, time travel, literary historical non-fiction, narrative history, post-writing narrative history—that offer a symbiosis of the two forms of narrative.
Bionote: Dominic Fenech is Prof. of History, Head of the History Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Malta. He holds a D.Phil. in modern history from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar. He never missed a HUMS meeting. Ivan Callus: “’My story is not what it should be’”: History and Literature, Ever Again.
Brief Abstract: History and literature are integral to and constitutive of each other. That much can be taken as read. It is little wonder, then, that the relation finds itself continually rewritten and reread. This presentation considers some recent examples of that reworking and their effect on evolving understandings of ‘story(telling)’.
‘Stories Are Us’: When History and Literature Meet HUMS (the Humanities, Medicine and Sciences Platform at the University of Malta) has been organising symposia and other events exploring interdisciplinary practice and potentials since its foundation in 2012. In its next event, HUMS turns its attentions to an immemorial and everfascinating interdisciplinary relation: that between history and literature. Committed, in contrasting yet complementary ways, to the lure of narrative and the calls and guises of truth, the discourses of history and literature bring into play the symbioses – and tensions – across attestable fact and the work of re-vision, retelling, reinterpretation, reimagination.
Stories Are Us: When History and Literature Meet, HUMS’ next symposium, draws together six scholars who will present reflections on some of the questions arising around that relation.
As the brief abstracts show, the presentations are diverse and wide-ranging. One idea,however, might be said to unite them. It would not do to anticipate history and literature, or to foretell how they might encounter each other (or not): and yet, have we ever stopped doing so, and is not that continuity one of the ways in which ‘stories are us’? A timely, even overdue, Symposium then – to be held at the Aula Magna in Valletta on 19 February at 18:00.
Brief Abstract: Sliding door moments in history are the source of endless fascination, providing the fuel through which the ‘What if?’ question burns ever brightly. As much as truth is stranger than fiction, people are often irresistibly drawn to alternative versions of the past.
Bionote: Emanuel Buttigieg is Associate Prof. in early modern history at the University of Malta. He read history at the Universities of Malta and Cambridge, obtaining his Ph.D. from the latter in 2008.
Key publication includes Nobility, Faith and Masculinity: The Hospitaller Knights of Malta, c.1580-c.1700 (Continuum, 2011), Islands and Military Orders, c.1291-c.1798 (Ashgate, 2013) co-edited with Simon Phillips, and The University of Malta: Legacies & Bearings (Malta University Press, 2020) as co-editor and co-author.
Brief Abstract: Devils, Kings, Tyrants, Poets. If these key words were presented in an exam for students to guess which age in English Literary and Political History best incorporates all four, chances are that students would choose the seventeenth century. We are assuming that students have a historical awareness and that they have heard of Milton’s Paradise Lost and the English Civil War. But who is who in all this? Let’s see how it works, if it works at all.
Bionote: Maria Frendo is Associate Prof. of English Literature at the University of Malta and a member of the editorial board of CounterText, a Literary Studies Journal published with Edinburgh University Press. Her major interest lies in poetry and the poetic. Maria is also a musician of sorts. She is assistant Artistic Director of the Victoria International Arts Festival.
Brief abstract: It is both intriguing and noteworthy that the significant events of the twentieth and early twenty-first century are barely represented in the novels of authors recognized within the Maltese literary canon. This stands in stark contrast to what is evident in poetry.
What might be the reasons behind these discrepancies?
Daniel Vella: “New Worlds, Old Stones: Ruins and Digital Games”
Bionote: Dr Daniel Vella is the Director of the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta. He is the co-author of Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). He is also a narrative designer for games, and his debut novel is due for publication in 2025.
