The Historian as Healer: Henry Rousso

Until the beginning of the 20th century, writing on contemporary topics for which the historian deals with living actors, was regarded as something suspicious. The idea still remains here and there among professional historians. Meanwhile, this part of the discipline became rather dominant in the last decades, fostered by the so-called "memory boom", which gave a new role to historians and other social scientists. Their act ivity isn?t any more the sole research for a better knowledge of the past. They are asked to be stakeholders in the global process of healing or repairing the wrongdoings of history.

Henry Rousso is the Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and is Professor of History at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. This semester he teaches at Columbia, History Department . His latest book in English is The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary.