Li Gerhalter, Tagebücher als Quellen: Forschungsfelder und Sammlungen seit 1800

Focusing on Germany and Austria from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, this erudite and thorough study aims at historicizing the use of diaries as scholarly evidence and historical sources in the academic disciplines of pedagogy and early childhood research, youth psychology, and the new cultural history emerging in the 1980s. For each of these disciplines, Li Gerhalter, the long-time curator and now director of the ‘Sammlung Frauennachlässe’ at the University of Vienna (https://sfn.univie.ac.at/hauptmenue/bestand/), traces whose diaries were collected, when, by whom, for which scholarly purposes, and to what effect for the formation and transformation of the respective academic discipline under scrutiny. In addition, the individual chapters shed light on the donors of diaries, the culture and practices of diary writing, and the different communicative and epistemological functions that diaries had for their writers and researchers.