Genetic and Biomolecular History – Bridging Sciences and Humanities

What, then, is an historian? In my work I look at multiple ‘new’ ways of approaching the past, thinking about evidence, ethics, the translation of information, and the construction narratives to rethink what we consider ‘historical’ work to be. Can we understand the reading of genetic material to be historical practice of a kind? In Bernadine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other (2021) the racist character Penelope uses a DNA test and the results challenge her sense of self and of her past: ‘this was the science that was the deepest, most secret part of herself, and there was a collision between who she thought she might be and who she apparently was’ (p. 446). How does Penelope’s investigation of her own past change because of the intervention of this ‘deepest’ science?

Who, then, is an historian? The paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2022. In acceptance he argued that: 'the information extracted from ancient genomes contributes to our understanding of the evolution and history of humans and many other organisms’. Pääbo’s understanding of the past as something that might be changed through new scientific innovation suggests that genetic data might be influential and important in rethinking the human past, both in terms of what that past might mean but also how that past might be translated into the contemporary moment. What do Pääbo’s thoughts about the nature of history mean for the practice of history, the work of history, the status of the historian? 

These Genetic and Biomolecular histories are not singular or even particularly unusual in their re-rendering of historical agency, understanding, and configuration of knowledge. For our purposes, however, Genetic and Biomolecular approaches allow us to approach what might be considered ‘standard’ historical ideas – ethics, evidence, data, argument, archive, narrative – with new insight, and in doing so open wider discussions about what historical practice even is. This talk is intended to provoke new thinking about the nature of the discipline of history and the ways that it might be resourced. It is also a way of reworking and reconfiguring our understanding of what historical ‘knowledge’ is and what we do with it.