by Gregorio Astengo, Nikolaos Magouliotis, Noelle Paulson, Maarten Delbeke
The day after our call for papers closed was one of mixed emotions. As we started to go through over 440 proposals, we wondered with satisfaction at the interest that microhistory, a 70-year-old method of historical analysis, appeared to spark in 2025. At the same time, we experienced vertigo at the thought of being able to select only one out of every eighteen proposals we received to pare the program down to a manageable number of twenty-five papers.
Expectedly, by the end of the long selection process, made possible thanks to the collective efforts of the conference’s Scientific Committee, we were frustrated that we had to leave out so many interesting proposals. But we were also confident that our final selection aptly demonstrated the increasing diversity of places and topics that engage our peers: from overlooked corners of known early-modern topoi like Paris or Bruges to less-known but historically loaded places such as Mauritius and the Faroe Islands.
At that point, another worry emerged: how could all these different cases, in their geographical and chronological diversity, speak to each other. Conferences usually bring together people with shared expertise. How do we make a conference about method? What happens if we as historians shift the emphasis from what we do to how we do it?
The two-and-a-half days we spent together at ETH Zurich’s historic main building were an experiment, and therefore also a challenge. On one hand, we were asked to follow each speaker to the innermost recesses of specific subfields. We followed gravediggers across the cemeteries of Ottoman Istanbul; we visited the toilets of Machu Picchu; we learned how to knot like the indigenous people of Melanesia, South Pacific; we travelled to an 18th-century construction site in colonial Mexico City. On the other hand, each of these journeys asked us to abstract broad and collective questions about methodology, evidence, interpretation, and most importantly of all perhaps, value. How does each of these cases matter within the vast ocean of historical events? And more generally, why does microhistory itself still matter at all?
The answers to all these questions became progressively more apparent after each speaker had taken us safely back to the ETH campus after another distant journey through time and space. As the conference drew to a close, we were able to verbalise the answer more openly by looking back at the premises of our call for papers. Each of these cases, no matter how specific, actively questioned canonical interpretations of architecture by bringing to the fore a variety of marginalised evidence, voices, places and histories. One paper used the minute traces of material fault on the surface of a building to talk about large-scale projects of state and colony; another one speculated about the form of a building that was no longer there by looking at the surrounding flora; a third one read between the lines of love letters to reveal the lived realities of colonial extraction. Many speakers devoted their attention to singular, anonymous documents such as receipts and inventories, while others wrote biographies of people whose names we will never know. In so doing, we accomplished what we had set out to do: to address the hyperspecific as a way to rethink the hypergeneral and to narrow our view in order to broaden our gaze.
Copyright ETH Zurich, Yonas Tukuabo.