This panel discussion is organised in honour of the late Professor Carlo Ginzburg, an outstanding historian of the twentieth century best known as a founding figure of microhistory. Alongside colleagues at Quaderni Storici in the 1970s, he helped pioneer a method that turned away from sweeping structural narratives toward small-scale, richly textured studies of individual lives and communities, as shown in his 1976 landmark oeuvre The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Ginzburg also theorised the "evidential paradigm," a method of historical inference built on clues and traces, drawing on detective reasoning, art connoisseurship, and psychoanalysis. Bridging history, anthropology, and literary theory, he expanded the very definition of historical evidence, recovering the voices of marginalised and previously silent subjects, and reshaping how historians understand the relationship between the particular and the general.
This discussion will honour the work and memory of Carlo Ginzburg, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to historical scholarship and on the occasion of the posthumous conferral of the Prix Nessim Habif.
Programme
- Welcome:
- Marie-Laure Salles, Director, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Marie-Laure Salles, Director, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Keynote:
- Martin Rueff, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Geneva
- Martin Rueff, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Geneva
- Roundtable discussion moderated by Marie-Laure Salles:
- Martin Rueff, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Geneva
- Stella Ghervas, Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World and Professor of International History and Politics, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Jan Kiely, Senior Lecturer of International History and Politics, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Awet Weldemichael, Professor of International History and Politics, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Q&A with the public
The event will be in French and in English.