Methods for Archival Silence in Early History
The American Historical Review seeks proposals for a special issue illustrating a range of methodological approaches to archival silence developed by scholars of early history. Articles may be grounded in any part of the world and address any topic as long as they are method-driven, focused on archival silence, and situated early within the periodization of your field.
About the Issue
What should historians do when our sources do not tell us what we want to know? Although this may be a universal experience of historical research, the problem arises in various forms. Some silences are intentional, others unintentional. Some sources are minimal, others extensive but off-topic. Some sources are inaccessible, some have not been preserved, some were never created. Sometimes we do not or cannot know whether our desired sources ever existed, or, if they did, what happened to them. Silences cluster around certain topics, places, and periods more than others.
Historians have articulated this problem in a variety of ways. This call uses the language of archival silence and silencing developed by Michel-Rolph Trouillard and Marisa Fuentes. It could have drawn on the concept of the subaltern (Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak), strategically produced silence and plausible stories (Natalie Zemon Davis), records designed for jettison (Marina Rustow), hidden transcripts (James Scott), living oral traditions (Bethwell A. Ogot), or writing off the radar (James Lockhart), to name only a few.
Faced with archival silence, historians have developed a range of methods for working in, through, and around it. Some techniques and approaches have become characteristic of expertise in early periods. Others are applied by historians across specializations. These include but are not limited to reading against the grain; creative combination of well-known sources; creative use of unusual or little-known sources; oral and other forms of non-written record; technical skills in the so-called ancillary disciplines (numismatics, paleography, codicology, epigraphy, and more); interdisciplinary approaches to method (anthropology, archaeology, literature, linguistics, and more) and to what constitutes a source (climate data, aDNA, physical objects, art, and more); critical fabulation or disciplined imagination; and reframing our questions to build on our sources’ strengths.
Submit a Proposal
Proposals should be submitted via Google Form by September 16, 2025. Proposals should be no more than 800 words in length and should address the following questions:
- What is your field of historical research? In the context of your field, why is your project considered early?
- Briefly describe the archive(s) or bod(ies) of sources on which your project is based. In what sense are these sources silent?
- Briefly describe the method(s) that you use to work with these sources. What methodological intervention does your project make, and why is it significant?
- What form will your project take in the journal?
We invite projects in a wide variety of forms. They can include, but are not limited to:
- Traditional research articles (no more than 8,000 words, excluding footnotes)
- Image- or video-centered projects
- Digital history/humanities projects
- Public history projects or virtual exhibitions
- Pedagogical projects that examine approaches to methodology and archival silence in the classroom
Decisions on proposals will be announced in November 2025. A positive decision does not guarantee publication in the journal but is rather an invitation to submit a full and complete version of the proposed project for peer review. The submission deadline for complete projects for peer review is May 1, 2026. We anticipate publication of the special issue in 2027.
Please contact the special issue editor, Hannah Barker (hannah.barker.1@asu.edu), with questions.