Getting to know other times and other places well enough to describe them convincingly is one of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction, but also one of its greatest challenges. Anyone can achieve a basic feel for an age by reading published histories, but to go beyond this, to enter the mental and physical world of the inhabitants of another age, to see through their eyes, to touch the objects that they knew and to speak with their voices, requires detailed knowledge and the understanding that can come only from autonomous research. Above all, it helps to know and understand contemporary source materials, but to find and use these requires specialised skills.
This one-day workshop aims to encourage writers to develop their abilities as historical 
researchers, introducing the tools and techniques employed by academic historians, and showing how to get the most from libraries, archives, museums, art galleries and, of course, the internet. Teaching will take place in an informal format with participants actively encouraged to discuss the problems they encounter and to share their own experiences.
Contributing to the workshop will be: Elizabeth Chadwick, author of The Time of Singing, To Defy a King and many others; Eleanor John, Head of Collections and Exhibitions at the Geffrye Museum of the Home; Dr Simon Trafford, Research Training Officer at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
It will take place between 10.30 and 17.00 on Thursday 26th April 2012 at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, located in Senate House. As numbers are strictly limited early application is advised.
For full details and instructions on how to apply please click here.
Have you enjoyed the Novel Approaches virtual conference? Is there anything we could have done better? Would you like to be kept informed of future virtual conferences that the IHR might hold?
When we began to sketch out this conference we at first struggled to come up with a name. We worked under the simple (but not very descriptive) title Historical Fiction conference. Coming from an academic history background such a title explained to us that this was a conference that investigated historical fiction from an academic history perspective, but we were the first to admit that outside these walls the title meant very little.
It can fairly be said that historians are often wary of fiction or at least to the suggestion of it. History is claimed as a science and an account of true things about the past. Fiction is the polar opposite. However, as this conference has already begun to show, the rise of academic history as we know it today went hand-in-hand with the rise of historical fiction and indeed both forms of writing are influenced by the other whether we like it or not. Not long ago the challenge of postmodernism sought to overturn the historian’s craft and still to this day there is a degree of uncertainty as to where history ends and fiction begins.
Novel approaches 