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Photograph of the inside of an archive, featuring a book trolley in front of a row of shelves containing archival materials.

Expanding the Archive: Fact and Fiction, Reading against the Grain, and Formats of Engagement

A Roundtable Discussion

Mirjam Brusius, Mirjam Hähnle, Mallika Leuzinger, Markus Mößlang, Ole Münch, Michael Schaich, Indra Sengupta, Pascale Siegrist, Clemens Villinger, Christina von Hodenberg

The archival repositories historians work with, and the methods they use to analyse their source base, have undergone significant changes in the past few decades. Increasing efforts are being made to reconstruct the history of groups which are historically under-documented in institutional archives, such as women, the poor and the aged, immigrants, or lower-caste and marginal community groups. Alternative sources and methods are being sought to supplement or challenge official records, not least in colonial, pre- and postcolonial settings, and regions where formal archives are sparse or difficult to access. At the same time, historians are being confronted with a range of new, often still untested digital history and artificial intelligence-led tools which promise the possibility of processing large corpora of sources. Our projects focus on the analysis or re-analysis of diverse sources, such as social science-generated data, quantitative databases, websites and social media, oral history interviews, visual sources such as photographs, locally produced tourist brochures, serial data, and material objects. We engage critically with questions of method, theory, digital history, and archival practice in this regard, and we look at power as an epistemic force undergirding the modern archive.

This discussion between GHIL historians on the institute’s cross-cutting research theme ‘Expanding the archive’ was recorded in January 2025. The questions were asked by Clemens Villinger and the answers collated by Christina von Hodenberg.

The power structures of archives privilege some voices of the past, while others, such as those of Black women, are often marginalized or fragmented. Some authors have used fiction to explore the experiences of forgotten and oppressed historical subjects. How do you see the relation between fact and fiction in your project?

Indra Sengupta

This is a central question for historians of modern India who are engaged in unearthing the voices and subjectivities of groups and communities (women, Dalit caste groups, tribal communities) whose histories are rarely found in official archives or in sources such as letters, diaries, and ego documents. Historical anthropology, oral history, and memory have come to the aid of the historian, and historiographic schools, such as the Subaltern Collective, have used these approaches to gain insight into ‘popular’ consciousness. ‘Popular’ histories, such as unofficially produced, not officially authorized histories—which are very often written in regional languages by relatively unknown authors and printed in small, local presses, therefore enjoying limited circulation—belong to this category, even though they are produced as printed texts. In my collaborative project on ‘Selling Histories’, I deal with such material as a resource to understand how historical narratives outside the realm of academic history are produced and what kinds of devices are employed to write about the past. These narratives present a mixture of historical evidence gained from standard histories, stories about heroes and villains, and often emotive accounts of what are perceived to be, for example, heroic, treacherous, noble, or virtuous deeds. It is always a challenge for academically trained historians to deal with material that is not evidence-based. The members of our group address the dilemma, but also the potential, that we as historians collectively face in dealing with fiction in the practice of our craft and in defining the boundaries of our discipline. In our projects, we engage with fiction and the fictional in different ways. In my collaborative project we look beyond the content of our sources to ask what the meaning of popular narratives of the past is, and in what historical and political contexts the narratives were produced. To this extent, the so-called ‘fictional’ parts of our sources are crucial. For example, they enable us to unlock the intended audience for particular historical narratives and to trace the relationship between the circulation of these tracts and the politics of the production and circulation of history in India since colonial times. In my view, this is not a departure from the methodological parameters of our discipline but a way to augment our knowledge of subjectivities when the official archive presents itself as inadequate. This is particularly true of the history of subaltern colonial and postcolonial subjects, as my colleagues Mirjam Brusius and Mallika Leuzinger also point out.

Mirjam Brusius

I work on the history of archaeology in the Near East. The people who excavated archaeological objects were rarely recorded in imperial archives. One possibility is therefore to juxtapose first-hand accounts by the excavators with further archival evidence from outside the imperial centres, that is, with ‘counter-archives’ or ‘alternative’ sources that can enrich and diversify definitions of and access to an archive, as well as the stories archives can tell about heritage value and its stewards. These can be visual materials, such as photographs, interviews, or information that lies between the lines of more conventional sources and can be accessed if read, with Ann Stoler, ‘against the grain’.1 While counter-archives are not fictional, a close reading of a photograph of workers can open up the imagination. Whether this lies within the scope of a historian is a matter for debate, but this approach certainly has the potential to disrupt the historic reliance on Western museums and heritage institutions as objective repositories of historical knowledge.

Photograph of the entrance portico of the British Museum on a sunny day.
Main Entrance of the British Museum, London. Photo by Ham, published under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Mallika Leuzinger

Broadly, my work explores the claims people make on and through images. I focus on how the camera became part of everyday life in South Asia, and am particularly interested in how women came to wield it both in and beyond the household, framing family, strangers, the countryside, and the street. I trace how their visions—curious, playful, matter-of-fact, mournful, adamant, outraged, irreverent, and as such never quite fact or fiction, or always both—then found their way into letters, albums, exhibitions, and the illustrated press. They also fell by the wayside: they were fragmented, obstructed, destroyed, or (more joyously and tenderly but always presumptuously) reconfigured and memorialized by their descendants. In taking their photographic lives seriously, I try to understand what Roland Barthes called the ‘disturbance’ of photography:2 the fundamental, if sometimes imperceptible and slight, transformation that the act of holding a camera, of posing for a photograph, of finding and losing one’s self in an image one or two hundred years down the line from its making, wreaks on civilization; or, following Walter Benjamin, its revolutionary use value.3 Thus, photographs are not stable documents, not only materials, not facts, so much as a force, something that interrupts, pierces, moves, re-orders. At the same time, I try to argue for what Ariella Azoulay conceives of as the ‘civil imagination’ of photography:4 the way in which it brings together the photographer, the photographed, the camera, and the spectator, allowing each to have a hold on the other and thereby furnishing precisely those who have been marginalized—captured, framed, expunged—with a set of rights to take up space, to talk back, to forge ahead. I would say that Azoulay’s theorization of photography as not just a ‘civil imagination’ but in fact a ‘civil contract’ is the most useful fiction I work with, a way to address this fragmentation and dispersal, this ebb and flow of photography—whether in the past or in the here and now—as a political field, even as I engage with it as a history.

Ole Münch

My research deals with people in the interwar years who drew on the social sciences to make sense of themselves. In 1930s Britain, for example, a social scientific organization called Mass Observation inspired hundreds of volunteers to write ‘objective’ accounts of their everyday lives, thoughts, and feelings. Whether their self-analysis was accurate in any ‘factual’ sense does not really interest me. Instead, I focus on the terms and rhetorical patterns they used to give the impression of ‘objectivity’. One could say that I engage with these texts like a literary critic dealing with fiction. In fact, this is often my first approach when reading a source text. I first adopted it as a student when I became fascinated with the ‘linguistic turn’—an academic movement that tends to even out the difference between fact and fiction. My teachers sometimes boiled it down to the catchphrase that ‘language creates reality instead of depicting it’. One could object that historians (including myself) have rarely ever followed the ‘linguistic turn’ as firmly as this phrase suggests that they should, and that the debate around it is dated. This does not mean, however, that the linguistic epistemology has been systematically dealt with and overcome. It just doesn’t spark as much interest as it once did. Many cultural historians have simply subscribed to more recent ‘turns’ or research agendas. In my approach to ego documents, for example, I am interested not only in the version of reality they create as texts but also in the act of writing them as a practice. I cannot, therefore, restrict myself to reading all sources like a literary critic; I must eventually make statements about real people doing things (with pen and paper). Like most cultural historians, in other words, I follow linguistic constructivism only up to a certain point. I just wish we would reflect more on what theoretical grounds we are allowed to draw that boundary.

Mirjam Hähnle

My project examines nature in early modern utopian projects—both built settlements and literary utopias in the British Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Thus I concentrate on works of ‘fiction’, or more precisely on imaginaries and practices of world-making. One of my key assumptions is that in the context of utopian projects, people not only formulated and practised radical alternatives to their current socio-political order, but also explored humanity’s relationship with nature. Transatlantic utopian networks can be used to trace both the colonial appropriation of people and nature that was crucial to this era, and the creation of counter-worlds and practices. In these times of escalating climate crisis, I think it is important to bring early modern utopian projects into dialogue with the critical utopian fiction that we might need today—and to consider whether there are any early modern utopian fragments we can use to articulate ‘concrete utopias’ (Gary Wilder)5 that are relevant to our times.

Pascale Siegrist

In my study of twentieth-century language inventors, one commonality has really stood out: among those who took to creating a language from scratch, we find an astonishing number of fiction writers—or more specifically, writers of fantasy or science-fiction literature. From an archival standpoint this raises several questions. For instance, how do these fictional works sit alongside other archival materials like grammars and dictionaries, correspondence, and biographical documents? If they are to be treated as ‘fiction’, should we respond as a literary scholar adopting a hermeneutic approach, or else as a fiction writer ourselves, and continue the tales? Or do these novels constitute the raw ‘facts’ of some of the most prominent uses of invented languages? Are the fictional universes themselves part of the context within which artificial languages made sense to their inventors and users? And can we take the authors’ own accounts of the relationship between fact and fiction as a reliable authority?


Christina von Hodenberg

As I am writing a history of ordinary women over 60 years of age, my protagonists’ voices rarely surface in official archives. In the twentieth century, this is quite a large population group that is often wrongly perceived as invisible, inactive, and apolitical. My method is to re-analyse of many hundreds of interviews given by elderly women to social scientists from the 1960s to the 2000s. While I am searching for patterns of storytelling in the interview transcripts, and often make a lot of room for individual life stories, I do whatever I can to distance my work from fiction. I try to cross-check key facts from individual accounts with archival searches and newspaper coverage. For example, when I came across a woman who vaguely outed herself as a Nazi functionary in an interview, I located her denazification file and looked her up in the Nazi party membership catalogue. I also test the representativity of individual cases by running statistical checks in large survey databases compiled from the 1970s onwards. For example, if I suspect that a majority of older women was hostile to ‘foreigners’, I will make use of large empirical surveys like the ALLBUS or the European Values Study to test how prominent xenophobic attitudes were among females over 60, as compared to other population groups at the time.

Michael Schaich

In the 1990s, I attended an Oberseminar at the University of Munich where we discussed the challenges of postmodern theory to historical writing. One of the books that impressed me most was Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language,6 a brilliant evocation of the mutiny on the Bounty and the encounter between European and Indigenous people in the South Pacific. Richard T. Vann called the book one of ‘the best examples of how a postmodern history might be written.’7 Dening presented his findings in a narrative that imitated theatre performances (with a list of actors, acts, and entr’actes instead of chapters and parts) and spiced it up with a good dose of anthropology, a combination that gave the book in parts an almost fictional quality. Still, Dening had done extensive research in contemporary and modern sources to reconstruct the multifaceted picture of the mutiny and its cross-cultural encounters. And this is where I draw the line between fact and fiction. In my view, historians can interpret the sources in a variety of (unconventional) ways and then argue about how convincing the chosen perspective is, but they always have to defend the story they are telling with reference to their sources (limited as their number may be). Where there are no sources, historians have to fall silent. Fiction has to be left to novelists.

Reading historical sources along and against the grain can take different forms and require different methods depending on your research question and the material you consult to make your argument. How do you identify the ‘grain’ in your source material? How and why do you read sources against or along it?

Michael Schaich

One of my projects focuses on handwritten newsletters which were sent by ‘information professionals’ from London to various German courts at the end of the seventeenth century. Here, I identify the ‘grain’ by comparing my newsletters with standard narratives of the political/parliamentary history of the British Isles in this period—narratives that were written from the nineteenth century onwards, and in particular from the 1960s to the 1980s. Some of my newsletters were used by older generations of historians to reconstruct the histoire événementielle of the period. By contrast, I’m interested in what my newsletter writers did not report and why, or what doubts they had about the reliability of their own reporting. I try to identify the gaps in the story, what they did not know (or did not want to know), and how much they could know at all.

Ole Münch

A big part of my research is about identifying the ‘grain’ and finding plausible explanations for how exactly it developed. I explore how my protagonists crafted sociological ‘subjectivities’ for themselves, for example in 1930s sociology class papers which I found in an archive in Chicago. I first read these sources ‘with the grain’ to find out what language they use to create a certain persona. I then reconstruct the writing process as a practice. In Chicago, sociology students were literally taught in class how to craft their ‘life histories’. They discussed with their instructors and co-students which biographical episodes mattered and how a ‘life’ is ‘usually’ patterned according to contemporary social psychology. Only after this did they sit down to write their life histories, keeping their instructor in mind as their audience.

Clemens Villinger

Because I use social science data as historical sources, the ‘grain’ is bound up in the questions the researchers asked, the methods they used, and the way they analysed their data. For my intended history of ‘normality’, I mostly (re)use data produced in historical or social science projects: statistics, ethnological diaries, long life-story interviews, and so on.

Christina von Hodenberg

I agree with you, Clemens, as my social science-generated sources are quite similar to yours. Which questions were asked of the interviewees, and who asked them, makes all the difference. It is essential to critically reconstruct the study design and understand the setting in which these sources originated. If I take the Bonn Longitudinal Study of Ageing (BOLSA), which started in the mid 1960s, as an example: often, the interviewers had good reason to avoid asking about Second World War experiences and involvement in Nazism. Many of them also saw the ageing process as inherently male and assumed women to be dependent on their husbands and devoid of their own political attitudes. This ‘grain’ can never be stripped away entirely, but repeated in-depth readings and attention to incidents where it was challenged by the protagonists at the time allow for deeper insights. I have also conducted interviews with some of the surviving interviewers to find out more about their methods, perceptions, and practices.

Photograph of an old-fashioned tape recorder from the 1960s.
Tape recorder of the type used by the BOLSA project for voice recordings. Photo by Christina von Hodenberg.

Indra Sengupta

Reading against the grain is an established practice in Indian historiography, especially in studies of peasants’ or other subaltern revolts against the colonial state. Historians have challenged the narrative presented by state actors in official representations which are held in official state archives and which we loosely describe as ‘the grain’. In dealing with the sources in our project, we read our narratives both against and with the grain. We try to identify the official histories of places and historical–religious structures and analyse how these have been incorporated into local histories, even as they have been augmented by tales of heroism, virtue, treachery, and suchlike, against the backdrop of historical events. By looking closely at the narrative tropes in our sources, we can to a degree unpack how, and sometimes how differently, events of great national consequence are perceived and remembered in places far removed from the centre of such events.

Markus Mößlang

I work on the history of naturalized British subjects—foreigners who acquired British citizenship—and notions of citizenship. Becoming (and being) a ‘citizen’ revolves around identity, whether from the individual migrant’s perspective or from that of British society. My sources are based on naturalization as a bureaucratic procedure. While it is possible to reconstruct the processes and norms that governed naturalization, the archival records reveal little about the applicants themselves. In order to provide insights, beyond anecdotal evidence and on a large scale, into the motivations for applying to be (and indeed the consequences or benefits of becoming) a British subject, my projects traces naturalized British subjects in the British censuses taken between 1841 and 1921, and includes other sources that provide glimpses into individual biographies. While I am not reading against the grain, I try to overcome the levelling ‘anonymity’ of the bureaucratic act of naturalization.

Mirjam Brusius

My aim is to better understand the myriad ways in which contaminated archives are navigated by communities, researchers, and practitioners—often against the grain. The orchestrated removal of objects and human remains by imperial institutions of knowledge production—museums, archives, and scientific bodies—has always been an inherently toxic endeavour. Ancestral remains and ceremonial artefacts have been contaminated by preservatives and insecticides as part of what Lotte Arndt calls ‘chemical conservation’.8 But toxicity in archives and collections also takes less direct forms. The very infrastructure of colonial and settler institutions often contaminates ancestral materialities, detaches them from lived systems of practice, and transplants them into new worlds of knowledge production which validate the very systems of dispossession that oversaw the extraction of these objects in the first place. In a workshop I co-organized with Dr Noam Leshem (Durham University) on ‘Untouchable Archives’ in spring 2025, we explored archive toxicity through its concrete effects and impacts. As it lodges itself in vast Indigenous material worlds, it risks robbing communities of the chance to reclaim histories, denying them the agency to make informed decisions about their ancestral heritage, whether by refusing the return of ancestral remains, protesting the appropriation of repatriated artefacts by state museums, or prioritizing material reparations over object repatriations. A series of questions guide our return to such toxic archives and their ‘grain’. What are the ethics of research in archives and collections that were assembled without consent? What forms of refusal (following Audra Simpson9) emerge in response to untouchable archives, and what tactics are used to enter, disrupt, or reclaim these collections? What protocols need to be put in place to mitigate the political and cultural toxicity of colonial collections and facilitate more just landscapes of research and action?

If you had no restrictions regarding format, media, length, or style, how would you choose to tell the story of what you research? If your project were a novel, who are the protagonists, what does the narrative arc look like, and how does your story end?

Clemens Villinger

I am interested in how researchers have defined normality and, at the same time, whether the subjects of research have defined themselves as normal or not. Definitions of normality tend to produce inclusions and exclusions, yet, curiously, the history of normality has often been told by looking at marginalized people. If I had the skills and time, I would love to produce a video essay about the history of normality. An artistic approach allows for a more dynamic way of telling a story because you can combine different media formats such as photos, video, or audio. These are easily accessible, appeal to people with different levels of knowledge, and allow them to delve deeper into the topic according to their individual interests. I also find fascinating when different media formats, storytelling, and archival sources are combined, such as in a piece of historical investigative journalism, published in Rolling Stone magazine,  called ‘The DJ and the War Crimes’, which is about the involvement of a techno DJ in a massacre in Bijeljina, Bosnia during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Ole Münch

I could well imagine writing my project as a tongue-in-cheek coming-of-age movie or novel, set in interwar London. In the prelude, the audience would learn that the First World War had recently shattered all confidence in European civilization and progress, and that against this backdrop contemporaries were regressing en masse, getting lost in new forms of entertainment and consumption. Amidst this mindless hedonism, my protagonist would be a discontented, searching soul—a man from the lower middle class, perhaps a shopkeeper’s son. Due to educational expansion, he would be the first member of his family to have come into contact with highbrow culture, and he would eventually start feeling superior to his middle-class neighbours. Most of them had long since lost their vitality, esprit, and sense of self, he would claim, numbed into mindless obedience by manipulative media and consumption. In order to help his contemporaries, my protagonist would band together with a group of like-minded individuals to set up a sociological association with the goal of overcoming modern ‘alienation’ by spreading social knowledge and sociological (self-)awareness. Soon, however, the sociological research itself would turn out to be full of mind-numbing routines. Frustrated, the members of the organization would focus their restless minds on one another, psychologizing and psychoanalysing their peers. Slowly, a competitive dynamic would creep into their interactions. Whoever was the most ‘objective’ (meaning ‘candid’) about the intimate ‘facts’ of their lives would be seen as superior and sophisticated, and eventually my protagonists would start trying to surpass each other. They’d share and ultimately invent the most extravagant or outlandish thoughts, dreams, sexual fantasies, and so on. In the end, the dynamic would escalate: they’d start to believe in their invented forms of madness and end up in mental institutions.

Pascale Siegrist

Even if I imagine myself as a more daring historian than I am, I am not sure whether adding my own layer of fictionalization would make the writings of language inventors more intelligible. One of the overarching goals of my project is to identify the common motives driving these very different language projects, to find out what people were aiming at and what (perceived) challenges they were responding to. I could imagine a literal conversation between these authors: what if I pictured them holding a conference? Would they, if they were in the same room, make more explicit what is often only implied? Throw the discrepancies into relief?

Photograph of a wall of books curving towards the camera.
A Wall of Books. Photo by Martin Vorel. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence.

Indra Sengupta

Much like the author Amitav Ghosh, whose historical novels are often taught in history lessons, a novel would be one way of telling the story of how people think about the past. However, it would perhaps be more exciting to bring the authors and readers of these narratives into conversation with academically trained historians—perhaps as a podcast. Or perhaps in person at the historical sites around which both academic and non-academic histories are produced. I can see a real challenge in trying to build bridges between the evidence-based, ‘objective’ protocols of historical analysis that we as professional historians are required to adhere to and the emotionally charged, storytelling mode of non-official, local histories. And yet I believe, if we are to ‘save’ history from being mobilized by illiberal, cultural-nationalist forces, as is the case in many countries of the world (witness the controversy about the National Trust and its approach to English country houses and their colonial past), then such dialogues and the opening up of our discipline to a wider, perhaps not very knowledgeable or scholarly-minded, public are essential.

Christina von Hodenberg

I collaborated with a German artist, Sonya Schönberger, to make the interview sources I am using into a series of radio features. Sonya contrasted the voices of the elderly with those of today’s historians and the social scientists who interviewed the study subjects at the time. I found the results, broadcast by Deutschlandfunk, fascinating. While I would not subscribe to everything in the programmes, I found this collaboration enriching and fruitful.

Michael Schaich

I could possibly transform the authors of my handwritten newsletters into the heroes of a spy novel. They would send reports from London back to their masters in Berlin or Hanover, relating the latest news from the (secret) corridors and backrooms of power in the British capital. However, I would struggle to build any suspense, since these newsletters only conveyed what nowadays would be the stuff of foreign reporting in newspapers or on TV. I also doubt that statesmen in Berlin or Hanover acted on the reports in any way, so the ending might fall rather flat . . . Maybe a classic radio feature with mock interviews about the work of foreign correspondents in the late seventeenth century would be a better choice of format?

Mirjam Hähnle

I would probably try to write my own great utopia, and fail. Like Bini Adamczak,10 I would conclude that in order to find utopia, we must first confront the coloniality and potential terror of historical utopias. The book would then enter into a conversation with the many women and men who, for better or worse, have imagined utopian worlds from the premodern period to the Black and ecofeminist utopias of the twentieth century. In the end, I’d be chasing utopian bits and pieces (ghosts) of past imaginaries.

Mirjam Brusius

I would give a glimpse of the often nameless labourers of nineteenth-century archaeological excavations, or of the workers who silently ran the imperial infrastructures that moved artefacts between field sites and European museums. What were their thoughts on the removal of artefacts by European travellers—objects which they and their families used for entirely different purposes in their daily lives, for example farming, workshops, shelters, or for building new structures? Such a shift in perspective might be an opportunity to ‘repatriate’ histories and to help develop a conceptual and more human framework for a global history that does not only depend on Western epistemologies. My hope would be that such subaltern histories would also contribute to a future in which museums present different stories, and also create more equal partnerships with the Global South in the age of repatriation.


Featured image: Archive View. Photo by Medea7. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.


  1. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009), 50. []
  2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London, 2009), 12. []
  3. Walter Benjamin, On Photography, ed. Esther Leslie (London, 2015). []
  4. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, trans. Louise Bethlehem (London, 2024). []
  5. Gary Wilder, Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity (New York, 2022). []
  6. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992). []
  7. Richard T. Vann, ‘Mr Dening’s Good Language’, review of Performances by Greg Dening, History and Theory, 39/1(2000), 77–87, at 86. []
  8. Lotte Arndt, ‘Poisonous Heritage: Chemical Conservation, Monitored Collections, and the Threshold of Ethnological Museums’, Museum & Society, 20/2 (2022), 282–301. []
  9. Audra Simpson, ‘On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, “Voice” and Colonial Citizenship’, Junctures, 9 (2007) 67–80. []
  10. Bini Adamczak, Beziehungsweise Revolution: 1917, 1968, und kommende (Berlin, 2017). []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Editor (July 22, 2025). Expanding the Archive: Fact and Fiction, Reading against the Grain, and Formats of Engagement. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved November 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14elp


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