THE ARCHIVAL TURN IN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN TÜRKIYE

Authors

  • İshak KESKIN Prof. Dr.,Department of Information and Records Management, Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University.

Keywords:

Archival turn, History, Türkiye, Historiography, Research trends, Tarih Dergisi.

Abstract

Introduction: This study explores the micro-level effects of the “archival turn,” which has emerged in the social sciences and humanities since the 1990s, on historiography and academic publishing in Türkiye. The archival turn refers to the transformation in the ways archives have been conceptualized across disciplines such as history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Informed by Ranke’s conception of history, Foucault’s discourse theory, and Derrida’s notion of “archive fever,” this approach reconceptualizes archives not as mere technical repositories but as entities with epistemological, ontological, social, and cultural dimensions.

In doing so, debates on archives have expanded beyond technical or institutional concerns to engage with broader fields of inquiry, including memory, discourse, digitization, ethics, and representation

References

1. Arvatu, A. (2011). Spectres of Freud: the figure of the archive in Derrida and Foucault. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 44(4), 141-159.

2. Bentley, M. (2005). Modern historiography: An introduction. Routledge.

Bertens, H. (2014). Literary theory: the basics. 3. edition. Routledge.

3. Bhandari, A.B. (2023). Evolving trends in modern history writing: A comprehensive overview. HISAN Journal, 9/1, 1-4.

4. Bloch, M. (1992). The historian’s craft (P. Putnam, Ttrans.). Manchester University Press. Blouin, F.X. (2004). History and memory: the problem of the archive. PMLA, 119(2), 296-298.

5. Brannigan, A. (2021). The archival turn in classical social psychology: some recent reports. Theory & Psychology, (310), 138-146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320920367

6. Breakell, S. (2008). Perspectives: negotiating the archive. Tate papers, (9). https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/219140/Perspectives_Negotiating_the_Archive.pdf Burke, P. (2018). “Writing history in the 21st century: challenges and responses”. Historia 396, 8(2), 11-26.

7. Burke, P. (2001). Eyewitnessing: The uses of images as historical evidence. Cornell University Press.

8. Burke, P. (2018). “Writing history in the 21st century: challenges and responses”. Historia 396, 8(2), 11-26.

9. Burton, A. (2001). Thinking beyond the boundaries: empire, feminism and the domains of history. Social History, 26(1), 60-71.

10. Callahan, S. (2022). Art + archive: understanding the archival turn incontemporary art. Manchester University Press. Callahan, S. (2024). “When the dust has settled: what was the archival turn”, and is it still turning?. Art Journal, 83(1), pp. 74-88, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2024.2317690

11. Carr, E.H. (2018). What is history?. Penguin. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press.

12. Chivallon, C. (2016). Between history and its trace: slavery and the Caribbean archive. Social Anthropology, 24(1), 67-81. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12280

13. Cohen, D.J. & Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Digital history: a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web. University of Pennsylvania Press.

14. Comay, R., Cummings, N., & Nicholson, B. (Eds.). (2002). Lost in the archives. Alphabet City. Derrida, J. (1995a). Archive fever: A Freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Orijinal çalışma 1994)

15. Derrida, J. (1995b). Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne. Éditions Galilée. Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: a freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Dirks, N.B. (2002). Annals of the archive: Ethnographic notes on the sources of history. In From the margins. historical anthropology and its future (pp. 47-65). Brian Keith Axel (Ed.). Duke University Press.

16. Eichhorn, K. (2013). The archival turn in feminism: outrage in order, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia): Temple University Press. Eichhorn, K. (2022). Reassessing “The Archive” in queer theory. Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici (Eds.). In Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (pp. 303-320). Duke University Press.

17. Erlenbusch-Anderson, V. (2024). Introduction: the archival turn in political theory. PS: Political Science & Politics, 57(1), 85-86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096523000549

18. Fass, P.S. (2003). Cultural history/social history: Some reflections on a continuing dialogue”, Journal of Social History, 37(1), 39-46.

19. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical inquiry, 8(4), 777-795. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge & the discourse on language (A.M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

20. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical inquiry, 8(4), Harvey, D. (2007). Neoliberalism as creative destruction. The annals of the American academy of political and social science, 610(1), 21-44. Hobsbawm, E.J.. (1971). From social history to the history of society. Daedalus, 100/1, (Winter, Special Issue: Historical Studies Today, 1971), pp. 20-45.

21. Hutchinson, A.C. (1984). From cultural construction to historical deconstruction. The Yale Law Journal, 94(1), pp. 209-238.

22. Iggers, G., Wang, Q.E. & Mukherjee, S. (Eds.). (2016). A global history of modern historiography. Routledge. Ketelaar, E. (2001). Tacit narratives: the meanings of archives. Archival Science, 1(2), 131-141.

23. Ketelaar, E. (2017). Archival turns and returns: Studies of the archive. Research in the Archival Multiverse içinde (ss. 228-268). A.J. Gilliland, S. McKemmish and A.J. Lau (Eds.). Monash University Publishing.

24. Ketelaar, E. (2023). Archival contexts. Archeion, CXXIV, pp. 35–56. DOI 10.4467/26581264ARC.23.003.17863

25. Kim, J. (2020). The uses of found footage and the 'archival turn' of recent Korean documentary. Third Text, 34(2), 231-254. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2020.1757231

26. Marshall, D. & Tortorici, Z. (2022). Introduction: (Re)Turning to the queer archives. In Turning archival: the life of the historical in queer studies (pp. 9-31). Daniel Marshall & Zeb Tortorici (Eds.). Duke University Press. Mawani, R. (2012). Law's archive. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8(1), 337-365. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102811-173900

27. McDonald, T.J. (1996). Introduction. In The historic turn in the human sciences (pp. 1-14). University of Michigan Press.

28. McNeill, J. R. (2001). Something new under the sun: An environmental history of the twentieth-century world (the global century series). WW Norton & Company. McNeill, J.R., & Mauldin, E.S. (Eds.). (2025). A companion to global environmental history. John Wiley & Sons.Muñiz, W. (2022). Critical archival theory and the Caribbean's neoliberal archival turn. Archival Science, 22(2), 239-257. https://doi.org/10.10071610502-021-09377-w

29. Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, (26), 7-24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520

30. Nora, P. (2006). Hafıza mekânları. (M.E. Özcan, Trans.). Dost. Öhrberg, A., Berndtsson, T., Fischer, O. and Mattsson, A. (2022). Introduction. Ann Öhrberg, Tim Berndtsson, Otto Fischer, Annie Mattsson (Eds). In From Dust to Dawn: Archival Studies After the Archival Turn (pp. 9-14). Borås/Sweden: Bording AB.

31. Roelstraete, D. (2009). After the historiographic turn: current findings. e-flux journal, 6, 1-10.

32. Simon, C. (2002). Introduction: following the archival turn. Visual Resources, 18(2), 101-107. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973760290011770

33. Steedman, C. (2002). Dust: The archive and cultural history. Rutgers University Press.

34. Stoler, A.L. (2002). Colonial archives and the arts of governance: on the content in the form, Archival Science, 2(1-2), 87-109.

35. Su, L. (2025). Tracing the archival turn: genealogies, dimensions and implications. Information Research an International Electronic Journal, 30, 52-64.

36. Tosh, J. (2015). The pursuit of history: Aims, methods, and new directions in the study of modern history (6th ed.). Routledge.

37. Trundle, C. and Kaplonski, C. (2011). Tracing the political lives of archival documents. History and Anthropology, 22(4), 407-414. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2011.626777

38. Walsham, A., Peters, K. and Corens, L. (2018). Introduction: Archives and information in the early modern world. Alexandra Walsham, Kate Peters, and Liesbeth Corens (Eds.). In Archives and information in the early modern world (pp. 1-25). London: Oxford University Press.

39. White, H. (2014). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

40. Xianming, W. (2022). On the new trends in recent Chinese historiography - An appraisal based on views from social history. Frontiers of History in China, 17(1), 108-131. https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-011-022-0004-6.

Published

20-10-2025

How to Cite

KESKIN, İshak. (2025). THE ARCHIVAL TURN IN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN TÜRKIYE. NUUz Conferences, 1(1). Retrieved from https://conference.nuu.uz/index.php/home/article/view/7

Similar Articles

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.