Format: hybrid (in person and online)
Language: russian
Mail: egodocuments.vectors.2025@gmail.com
Organizers:
Victoria-Anneta Degtyar, Junior Research Fellow, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Kristina Kim, Fourth-year student, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University (SPbU)

Ellina Olkhovskaya, Graduate of the World Politics program, Faculty of Social Sciences, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES)

Maria Selezneva, Fourth-year student, Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)

Ego-documents are historical sources in which the “I-statement” – the testimony of an individual – comes to the fore. This category includes personal diaries and letters, as well as memoirs and autobiographical writings. The study of ego-documents allows researchers to focus on the individual within large-scale history, to give historical events a human perspective, and to revisit familiar narratives from unexpected angles.

Historical ruptures and tragedies – revolutions, terror, war – often become moments when people turn their gaze inward and keep diaries more intensely. At first glance, this may seem paradoxical: instability and disorder might appear to push individuals into a mode of survival, where attention is directed toward basic needs. Yet scholars of ego-documents suggest the opposite. Despite uncertainty, fear that a diary might fall into the wrong hands, and even shortages of paper and ink, people continued to record their thoughts about themselves and the world around them.

Today, working with ego-documents is an integral part of studying the past. However, many important personal texts remain under-researched or known only within a narrow circle of specialists. Historians still face a number of key questions, the discussion of which could enrich the field of ego-document studies.

What did diary writers notice and write about during times of major change or crisis? What can individual ego-documents tell us about their authors – and what do they reveal about the time in which they were created? How can first-person testimony help historians expand their understanding of a period? And how might ego-documents contribute to museum and educational work, conveying difficult pasts through the voices of witnesses?

We invite participants in this panel to reflect on these and other related issues. We welcome scholars from various disciplines to join an interdisciplinary and dynamic dialogue on the theoretical and practical dimensions of studying ego-documents.

• Ego-Documents as an Alternative History:

How do ego-documents help fill gaps in official narratives?

• Ego-Documents in Totalitarian States:

Including processes of censorship and self-censorship, strategies of resistance, and escapism.

• Gender Studies and Ego-Documents:

The construction of “female” and “male” experiences in periods of instability (see, for example, the collection “As Long as I Live, You Live Too”: Women’s Diaries of the Siege of Leningrad, published by the European University at St. Petersburg).

• Ego-Documents Written by Children and Adolescents:

Historical ruptures as seen through a child’s perspective.

• Ego-Documents in Memory Studies:

Including the role of family and state archives in shaping representations of the past.

• Ego-Documents and the Study of Historical Trauma:

The reflection of traumatic events in personal writings.

• Ego-Documents in the Age of Technology:

How is the nature of ego-documents changing in the digital era, and how do they differ from traditional forms? In particular, the emergence of new formats of personal documentation, such as writing about life in unstable times on social media.