Oct 21, 2025 · 48 min · 9 segments
In this 9th episode of Abratalks, we welcome Aurèle Tobelem, Director of Research at the Forum for Foreign Relations, Historian, and Cultural Strategist. From the Gaza ceasefire to the evolving…
I saw on your social media that you present your journey as bridging scholarship and storytelling, which is quite out of the box.
I would like to hear you about the interconnection between both.
To what extent history, that you chose as your main discipline, which is an academic discipline, and history, which is also an analytical way of explaining human evolution and the world helps connect with people helps tell and write stories helps highlight preserve and sometimes even maybe revive specific narratives identities memories
it's a good question i have to say scholarship is often focused on the scholars more on what they're actually studying.
But we often fall into the trap of not allowing overlapping stories to enter our lives.
You take a number of narratives, stories, evidence that's given in these stories and then you organize them.
You put them into a better format, something that is actually digestible, something that a reader would like.
A good historian also has to be a storyteller, at least when they are telling the stories that they actually put together.
Outside of music, art, or other forms of aesthetically pleasing engagements, People often connect most through stories, through oral traditions, through the written word.
And so it only makes sense that a historian and a storyteller actually have very similar roles, just different levels of, I guess, elitism and privilege surrounding them.
I saw on your social media that you present your journey as bridging scholarship and storytelling, which is quite out of the box.
I would like to hear you about the interconnection between both.
To what extent history, that you chose as your main discipline, which is an academic discipline, and history, which is also an analytical way of explaining human evolution and the world helps connect with people helps tell and write stories helps highlight preserve and sometimes even maybe revive specific narratives identities memories
it's a good question i have to say scholarship is often focused on the scholars more on what they're actually studying.
But we often fall into the trap of not allowing overlapping stories to enter our lives.
You take a number of narratives, stories, evidence that's given in these stories and then you organize them.
You put them into a better format, something that is actually digestible, something that a reader would like.
A good historian also has to be a storyteller, at least when they are telling the stories that they actually put together.
Outside of music, art, or other forms of aesthetically pleasing engagements, People often connect most through stories, through oral traditions, through the written word.
And so it only makes sense that a historian and a storyteller actually have very similar roles, just different levels of, I guess, elitism and privilege surrounding them.
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