Modern Scholarly Biography in the Humanities: its Teaching Potential and Possible Pitfalls in Post-totalitarian Czech Society

Abstract

This paper describes the changing role of biography in the context of historiographical methodology and the historian’s approach to research. The primary focus is on biographies by history scholars, though the same developmental tendency may be observed in contemporary biographies of prominent literary historians, historians of the creative arts and music, ethnographers, archaeologists, pedagogues and so on. There is a description of certain methodological problems, the potential and the pitfalls of research in the field of modern historiography and other social sciences which have arisen as a result of changes in academic discourse during the 20th century, including specific restrictions in the availability or usability of sources, or the classical limits of ego-history as such.