Jerome de Groot: "Race, Genetics, History"

Research presentation by Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester

Abstract: 

Genetic data is increasingly shifting the ways in which history is researched and represented. This raises a number of key questions for historians of all kinds. What are the implications of such expanded genetic datasets for the practice of history? How can genetic data change experience of the past, and our way of conceiving what that past is? How does genetic knowledge challenge normative versions of what historical information might be, or how it might be presented? Given the focus on ethnicity inherent in much work, what does this mean for the study of race? ‘DNA analysis is re-creating how we know the past and even how we now define the social world’ argue Alondra Nelson, Keith Wailoo, and Catherine Lee. My work seeks to understand and to critique this ‘recreation’ in relation to historical understanding, practice, and imagination. I outline a set of approaches for comprehending and understanding the ways that we think about the past. Consideration of different modes of ‘reading’ the past reconfigures our understanding of what that past is, how it is constructed, and what it might mean.