The Packbats' Weblog

Content warnings for discussion of trauma, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and suicide.

"Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?" from The New Republic.

This paragraph in particular jumped out:

It is bad advice to say that politics, sex, and religion ought to be kept out of polite conversation, but nobody wants you to bring up a genocide at a dinner party. “The extent to which my research is ‘dark’ and therefore not polite dinner conversation means I’m repeatedly isolated in piecing through the material,” Elena Gallina, a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and researcher of sexual violence in wartime, told me.

It makes me think of the equation from that old Tumblr thread about abuse, PTSD, and emotional neglect: "Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD".

If historians are expected not to be traumatized by traumatic history? This, we would expect, would make their trauma worse.