The following publications are texts or issues of journals that IABA listserv members have published, announcement for new journals with calls for papers, announcements of new publication series, or schedules and programs of events held by lifewriting programs and centers.
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A Book by List Members–Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Davies and Rifkind, Wilfred Laurier P)
June 15th is the official publication date for Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, a co-authored study by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind with a Foreword by Vinh Nguyen. This is the second title in the new series Crossing Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University Press (co-edited by Barbara Postema, Candida Rifkind, and Nhora Lucía Serrano).
Reasonably priced in paperback at $39.99 Canadian, with ebook options, pre-orders can be placed now directly at the press website or from your favourite independent booksellers, including bookshop.org.
DESCRIPTION
Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.
Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced and bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Rather than simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Building on scholarship in critical refugee studies, architecture and infrastructure studies, and postcolonial theory, Davies and Rifkind argue that refugee comics move us through this wider recognition and towards more expansive ideas of refuge as a lived political relationship.
REVIEWS – Joe Sacco Graphic Refuge is a thorough interrogation of graphic-narrative responses to the massive human migration that now challenges a Western world heavily implicated in the wars and climate change that drive it. In their willingness to question the motivations of the artists, the readers, and the terminologies and tropes that burden the refugees, I discern the humanity behind their intellectual rigor: Davies and Rifkind — like us all — have skin in this game.
– Hillary Chute, Northeastern University It is impossible not to learn from this book on refugee comics: it is profound, sophisticated, brilliantly constructed – and deeply urgent. With dazzling breadth and a wealth of images, theoretically deft and often moving, Graphic Refuge is a crucial contribution to thinking about the borders, movement, and exchanges of contemporary life, expression, and politics. A major achievement.
Dr. Candida Rifkind (she/her)
Professor | Department of English | University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 CANADA
Graphic Refuge: Mobility and Visuality in Comics (forthcoming 06/25)
I live and work on Treaty One Territory and the homeland of the Red River Métisnation.
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European Journal of Life Writing New Cluster–Life Writing and the Digital
We are pleased to announce that we just published the first three papers of a new cluster at the European Journal of Life Writing site: “Life Writing and the Digital”, edited by Sandra Mayer and Timo Frühwirth.
The cluster makes a timely contribution to the study of life writing with a focus on the digital. Like all contributions to our journal, it is completely open access. Three papers can now be read at our website:
– “Archiving Uncertainty: Leveraging Crowdsourcing Methodology in Documenting Personal Experiences of COVID-19” by Sanita Reinsone, Ilze Ļaksa-Timinska, Haralds Matulis, and Elvīra Žvarte.
– “The Evolution of Arabic Self-Expression in the Western Mediterranean: Using an Annotation Schema as a Comparative Framework” by Laila M. Jreis-Navarro.
– “Finding Aids and Networked Biography: Stuart Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies” by Katherine Parsons
Over the coming months, a few more papers, as well as editorial sections are expected to be added to this cluster.
Kind regards,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Journal Manager
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
The European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies
No. 24, Spring 2025
Center for Life Writing, SJTU, China
Contents
[Special Article]
The Formation of the Cultural Clusters of Biography and the Mission of the Poetics of Biography: Preface to the English Version of A Modern Poetics of Biography……Yang Zhengrun
[Special Section: Interview]
Life writing and its Contemporary Practices: An Interview with Anna Poletti ……Shen Chen
[Theory Studies]
New Biographical Criticism: A Re-Examination of Biographical Criticism as an Approach to Literature……Zhang Huifang
“Faithfulness” Above All: The Chinese Translation of Biography Titles……Tang Xiumin
[History of Life Writing]
Retrospect, Style and Reflection: The Biography of Objects and Its Implications for Contemporary Biographical Studies……Sun Wenqi
An Exploration of the Writing on the Sages in Medieval Prefectural Chronicles—With a Focus on the Ancient “Biographies of Sages”……Tong Yang Li He
Research on Foreign Biographical Literature in the Second Decade of the 21st Century
……Quan Zhan
[ Comparative Biography]
A Stylistic Analysis of Lin Yutang’s Lady Wu: A Comparison with Lei Jiaji’s Biography of Wu Zetian……Liu Ping
[Text Studies]
The Writing of Imperial Cultural Memory Under the Genre Issue of Death of a Hero
……Li Tianxin
A Study on the “Anti-Biography” Characteristics of the Critical Biodrama by Hisashi Inoue
……Cui Xueting
[Autobiography and Memoir Studies]
Mobility and Cross-Cultural Identity Construction of Arab Women in Leap of Faith
……Wang Yang Zou Lanfang
Internal Focalization and Feeling Representation in Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin
……Li Qionglu
An Endeavor for Recognition and Reconstructing Norms: Annie Ernaux’s Intervening Writing
……Ding Wenjun Zheng Ningning
Return Migration Narrative as Auto-ethnography: An Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place……Chen Pengyu
[Letter Studies]
Affectation and Sincerity in Alexander Pope’s Letters……Liu Can Sun Yongbin
Writing Beyond Borders and the Formation of Chineseness: On Letters of Eileen Chang, Stephen Soong & Mae Fong Soong……Li Guicheng
[Biographer Studies]
Authenticating Falsehood and New Interpretation: On Li Shutong’s Compilation of a Biography of Han Wo and His Sentiments……Zhong Shulin Ke Jiawei
[ Subject Studies]
An Examination of Xiong Foxi’s Interactions with Zhou Zuoren (1922-1934)……Yang Yang
Ba Jin’s Dual Personality and Writing Challenges……Wang Yahui
[Graphic Life Writing]
On the Narrative Functions of Reproduced Images in Graphic Memoirs……Pan Qiaoying
Representation of the Unwitnessed: Biopolitics Discourse, Community Dilemmas, and Survivor Memory Ethics in Maus……Zhao Yitong
[Textual Research of Historical Materials]
Who Killed Wu Peifu? : A Reinvestigation into the Cause of his Sudden Death
……Yu Guichao Song Ziteng
[PhD Dissertation Extracts]
A Comparative Study of Franz Kafka’s Biographical Images……Qu Linfang
Call for PhD Dissertation Extract
Instructions to Contributors
From the Editor …Yang Zhengrun
Instructions to Contributors
Mission
Life writing studies have moved onto the central stage in the academia and gained ever more attention both in and outside China. As the first scholarly journal in the field of China, the biannual journal Modern Life Writing Studies intends to fill up the blank of life writing studies in China, provide a venue for scholars all over the world, attract and promote specialists in the field.
Aiming to keep abreast of the cutting edge of life writing research, Our journal seeks to, in modern views and perspectives, explore various topics of life writing in China and in the world, with almost 20 sections included, such as Interview, Comparative Biography, Theory Study, History of Life Writing, Text Study, Autobiography Study, Diary Study, Subject Study, Film Biography, Book Reviews, Life Writing Materials, From the Life Writer, etc.
Ever since its appearance in 2013, our journal has been well-received by scholars at home and abroad and fundedby a steady grant from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It is exerting increasingly greater influence in academia with a due wide positive response. In 2017, our journal was included in CSSCI (Chinese Social Science Citation Index), and listed in the international academic literature or included in the annual annotated bibliography by world prestigious universities.
Our journal accepts both Chinese and English submissions. All the articles will be subject to anonymous peer review.
Style
Submissions are welcome from both Chinese and international researchers. Simultaneous submissions are not accepted. English papers should be between 4,000 and 7,000 words of text in length (including notes), while English book reviews are about 2,500 words. Full-length articles take up most part of the journal, but short essays with originality and fresh ideas are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines
All written submissions should be formatted according to the eighth edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. All submissions should include a 100-word abstract both in Chinese and English, keywords (less than 5), a 70–word biographical statement, and works cited. Please adhere to the following requirements:
•Double spacing, Times New Roman, 12–point font
•One-inch margins
•Only Microsoft Word doc or docx files will be accepted
•Citations should be provided in parenthetical reference followed by “Works Cited”.
•Endnotes are preferred if there are any.
Submissions should be emailed in Word format to the editor sclw209@sina.com. Each contributor will get two complimentary copies once his/her paper is published.
Our journal is based at SJTU Center for Life Writing. We welcome suggestions and proposals, from which we believe our journal will surely benefit.
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To the Conferees of IABA Americas this June–and of potential interest to list members–Traveling to the U.S.
Dear Conferees,
Committed to international scholarship, inclusivity, and the free exchange of ideas, the conference organizers of the 2025 IABA-Chapter of the Americas meeting are closely monitoring the evolving policies and actions of the United States government that may affect global mobility and participation in academic events. As an organization that celebrates and values every member, we remain steadfast in our commitment to creating a welcoming, respectful, and intellectually vibrant environment for all. While we, as a non-profit, are limited in our capacity to influence governmental policy, we want to acknowledge the concerns and challenges some of our attendees may face.
We recognize that recent developments in U.S. federal and state policy have created uncertainty for many of our members, particularly those traveling from abroad. As of April 2025, for example, Canada, Australia, and many European countries have issued travel advisories related to entering the United States. We encourage attendees to contact their universities and institutions, home country governments, and/or consulates before traveling. For those entering the United States, we recommend reviewing resources offered by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and the National Immigration Law Center, which outline important information on traveler rights and border procedures.
While our conference takes place within the U.S., the explicit mission of the International Auto/Biography Association, and its various chapters, extends beyond borders—to foster diverse, interdisciplinary conversations and amplify voices from around the world. Such commitment is clear in the planning of this year’s conference, “Signs of Life,” which includes keynotes from Dr. Katrina Powell, titled “Rhetorics of Spatial Justice: Archiving, Autobiography, and Resistance as Signs of Life,” and Dr. Ricia Anne Chansky, titled “Story as Resistance: Signs of Life in the Time of Great Silencing.” The conference will feature panels and plenaries devoted to artmaking, the work of life writing now, the 40th anniversary of the journal a/b, and crucial opportunities to gather together informally to consider how breaking down borders–disciplinary, national, generic, and more–demonstrates signs of life.
We encourage our members and conference-goers to stay in touch with us to share concerns, suggest ways forward, or request support, particularly given the fluidity of the situation and the potential for continued unrest and impacts of these current policies. To connect with the conference organizers, please reach out directly to iabaa2025@gmail.com. Our community is stronger when we care for one another and come together in person, for the first time in many years, especially in moments of uncertainty. As we gather in Cape May to consider “Signs of Life,” we continue to carry and amplify the mission of the IABA, founded in 1999 as a multidisciplinary network that aims to broaden the world vision of auto/biographers, scholars, and readers; to deepen the cross-cultural understanding of self, identity, and experience; and to carry on global dialogues on life writing. Thank you for being a part of this work and for all that you do to sustain inquiries of life writing. We look forward to seeing you in June!–
Nicole Stamant, PhD
Fuller E. Callaway Professor of English
Affiliated Faculty: Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Buttrick Hall, Room 216
Pronouns: she/her/hers
404.471.6062 (phone)
141 E. College Ave.
Decatur, Georgia 30030
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Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4
Available on Project Muse
Editor’s Note
Special Cluster – Reimagining the Past, Present, and Future: History, Temporality, and Life Writing
Reimagining the Past, Present, and Future: History, Temporality, and Life Writing
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Kimi Kärki, and Kirsi Tuohela
This cluster, comprising an introduction and six essays, seeks to integrate the disciplines of life writing and history, building on discussions from the 2022 IABA World Conference, “Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present, and Future.” Temporality has emerged as a critical dimension for analyzing narratives of lives, and serves as a central theme of this cluster, explored through diverse methodologies, including historians’ attentiveness to the past and archival practices, as well as literary, narrative, and other critical analyses. The cluster aims to illuminate the multifaceted and intellectually intricate nature of temporality, addressing perspectives that range from the global to personal and familial histories, from narratives of climate change to those of trauma. It also emphasizes the role of imagination and creativity in shaping and reinterpreting our understanding of the past.
Stories of a Life: Backward, Forward, or Sideward?
Jens Brockmeier
The wider theoretical and empirical context of this study is the temporal multilayeredness of our narrative constructions of life and identity, both in fictional and nonfictional genres of life writing. Using examples and illustrations from autobiographical memory, fiction, photography, and everyday phenomenology, this essay argues that narrative—in Western traditions of identity formation—plays a crucial role in juggling the many balls of time and identity.
Biofiction’s Melancholic Agency: Deep Time and the Return of History in the Works of Amin Maalouf and Colum McCann
Laura Cernat
Aiming to nuance Paul Ricoeur’s theories about temporality and identity in fiction and historiography, this article explores biofiction through the prism of Fernand Braudel and Wai Chee Dimock’s notion of deep time. Building on case studies by Amin Maalouf and Colum McCann, I coin the notions of “deep-historical biofiction” and “biofictional histoire croisée” to draw attention to these contemporary writers’ awareness of history’s impact on individual destinies in a world of interdependent developments, which resists human agency while also inviting it to persist. Here I introduce the idea of melancholic agency. Inspired by Ian Baucom’s concept of “melancholy realism” from Specters of the Atlantic and its application by Debjani Ganguly to the contemporary world novel, melancholic agency in biofiction entails preserving the emphasis placed by Michael Lackey on human agency as a distinctive attribute of the genre, while acknowledging that, especially in novels concerned with deep time, this agency often resides only in the power to bear witness, or to imaginatively restore lost truths. This suggests that the gap between the biographical and the historical novel is narrower than previously theorized in biofiction scholarship.
Embedded and Retrieved: A Full Circle of Life, Birth, and Death within Forty-Two Square Meters
Selma Ćatović Hughes
This work aims to engage visual storytelling to reveal the tangible and elusive layers of personal and collective memory. A forty-two-square-meter apartment in Sarajevo purchased by a newlywed couple in 1972 would go on to witness the birth of two children, the early loss of two parents, and life under the siege. A series of original drawings, overlaid with information retrieved from the past (photos, artifacts, and letters), begins to reveal recollections embedded in the space across four decades: the chants of a grandmother’s blessings for the empty new space; the happiness and liveliness of children filling the home with life; the sudden loss of a parent and the basic struggle for survival during the war; the reconstruction of lives in post-conflict society; and finally, another loss of life, and with that, the loss of home. Simultaneously recalling the past and projecting the transformation of the future sequence of events, “Embedded and Retrieved” weaves immaterial connections between life episodes, their impact on spatial modification, and the metamorphosis of the place forever called home.
Picturing a Cubist View of Time (and Space) in Autobiographical Comics
Nancy Pedri
This essay addresses how space and time in autobiographical comics are productively understood in relation to characters and their minds. Distancing itself from approaches that see the relation between time and space as a feature of the formal language of comics, it examines time and space across verbal-visual narrative strategies that deconstruct the bodies of characters or dissolve the spaces they occupy. Through several examples of what can be called, following comics creator Michael DeForge, a cubist view of time, “Picturing a Cubist View of Time (and Space) in Autobiographical Comics” traces how autobiographical comics create temporal and spatial overlaps and indistinctions that can communicate troubled or wounded mental states.
Here for 450 Million Years, Going Now: Ocean Timelines, Climate Crisis, and Life Writing
Clare Brant
This article lays out a case for lifewriting scholars to think about numbers as an important constituent of climate crisis writing. Numbers are critical to how we describe time, plummeting numbers of species, and accelerating rates of extinction. Numbers are also critical to how we establish scales. I discuss infographics as a lifewriting genre that combines biography and numbers, a genre that lends temporary stability to otherwise unimaginable scenarios. Various iterations of numbers in timekeeping devices such as clocks and time bombs provide ways of imaging time and contribute to the power of numerical narratives to tell life stories. So too does biologging, a biographical genre. Studies of future oceans modelled through currently nearly dead, time capsule seas project futures through numbers. The life history and short future of sharks frames my analysis of the power of numbers in life writing.
A Short History of Being Wrong
Sirpa Kähkönen
Sirpa Kähkönen discusses political polarization and political violence during the Finnish Civil War in 1918 and again in 1930. She contextualizes the topic to her own family history, and tells about her explorations with her grandfather’s private archives, as well as her extensive work in the official police and prison archives, and how she came to write both fiction and nonfiction based on this archival work. The microhistorical concept of immaterial inheritance has been the main source of inspiration for Kähkönen, and she has also been deeply involved in questions of psychohistory, epigenetics, and the transgenerational effects of wars and other humanitarian crises.
Open-Forum Articles
Expertise and the Technological Object: Narrating Lived Experience of Deafness, Hearing Aids, and Cochlear Implants in Online Forums
Jessica Kirkness and Nicole Matthews
This article discusses the relationship between technological objects—specifically hearing devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants—and the stories told about them on hearing-related blogs and online forums. We focus on accounts of lived experience written by deaf and hard of hearing people, and the ways they navigate competing narratives around expertise in relation to these objects. We discuss how these online “flash autobiographies” draw from available scripts around deafness, simultaneously challenging the hierarchy of expertise in hearing health and highlighting the binary between medical and social model accounts of disability. We focus on the ways that self-formation is mediated in these stories, with many testimonies emphasizing mastery through medico-technical discourses and numerical subjectivities. Drawing on the narratives in these public forums, we sketch the diverse relationships between expertise and the intimate object of the hearing device.
The Centenary of the “Polish Method”: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Memoir Competitions in Poland
Agata Zysiak
The first memoir competition in Poland took place one hundred years ago. This landmark method of Polish sociology began in the interwar period, experienced a later state-socialist boom, and then Poland’s impressive collection of memoirs was largely forgotten and almost destroyed in the 1990s. In this essay, I examine the development of memoir competitions in Poland and discussions around them as a method, giving particular attention to the political agenda of memoir studies during the People’s Republic of Poland. In the context of recognizing working-class and peasant people as social actors and political subjects, I defend postwar memoir competitions as a reliable and valuable means of arguing against the idea that memoirs were merely political tools to legitimize the socialist state. Ultimately, the memoir competitions play a crucial role in revisionist interpretations of the postwar history of Poland, state socialism, and to a certain degree, the entire socialist world.
Review Essay
Questions of Degree: Autofiction on Spectrums from Individual to Collective and from Fiction to Reality
Alexandra Effe
This review essay shows how Hywel Dix’s Autofiction and Cultural Memory (Routledge, 2023) and Fiona J. Doloughan’s Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel (Anthem Press, 2023) partake in three recent developments in autofiction studies: the exploration of the global reach of autofictional practice, the foregrounding of autofiction’s often ethical orientation, and the need to consider production and reception in approaching a phenomenon difficult to pin down to textual elements alone. Taking inspiration from Dix’s and Doloughan’s studies, the essay develops a theoretical argument for considering autofictional texts as always straddling a spectrum of individual and collective elements, and as always being grounded in reality as well as being fictionally transformed.
Reviews
Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World, by Michael Richardson
Reviewed by Gillian Whitlock
The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky
Reviewed by Sergio da Silva Barcellos
Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, by Garry L. Hagberg
Reviewed by Sarah Allen
Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age, by Helga Lenart-Cheng
Reviewed by Laurie McNeill
A History of African American Autobiography, edited by Joycelyn K. Moody
Reviewed by Nadine M. Knight
The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future, by Amanda Apgar
Reviewed by G. Thomas Couser
I Lived to Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War, by Elizabeth Mehren
Reviewed by Roger Porter
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The latest issue of a/b:Auto/Biography Studies (40.1) contains a timely cluster on Political Biofictions that I edited. The cluster contains articles by Alexandre Gefen, Patrick Hayes, Catherine Padmore, Virginia Newhall Rademacher, and Claire Ravenscroft.
Here is a link to the issue:
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/raut20/40/1
And here is the table of contents.
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 40, Issue 1 (2025)
Essay Cluster: Political Biofictions, edited by Virginia Rademacher
Editorial
Introduction to Political Biofictions
Virginia Newhall Rademacher
Pages: 1-14
Essay Cluster: Political Biofictions, edited by Virginia Rademacher
Essays
The Glory of the Tiny. The Egalitarian Utopia of Biofiction
Alexandre Gefen
Pages: 15-26
“Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”: Biofictions of Orwell and Their Contemporary Political Engagements
Catherine Padmore
Pages: 27-47
Rachel Kushner’s “Bullshit Hagiography”
Claire Ravenscroft
Pages: 67-89
History in Person: Intergenerational Memory in Young Literary Life Writing
Anders Høg Hansen
Pages: 91-108
(Dis)Composed Dwelling: Writing Ruins of Disaster
Miriam Rowntree
Pages: 109-128
Rethinking Autofiction as a Global Practice: Trajectories of Anglophone Criticism from 2000 to 2020
Alexandra Effe & Hannie Lawlor
Pages: 129-166
(Re)Framing Madame X: Art, Narrative, and the Ethics of Neo‑Victorian Revivification
Kate Mitchell & Kathryne Ford
Pages: 167-19
“In This Bleak Abyss”: The Speculative Autobiographical Writings of Carmen María Machado and Esmé Weijun Wang
Postcolonial Biopower and Auto|Biography in Life & Times of Michael K
Aaron Lee Greenberg
“Problem Girls”: Gender Nonconformity as Resistance in Early Disabled Feminist Life Writing
Jess Waggoner
Pages: 241-271
“Super Vision” of Humanity: Autobiographical Cartoons and Drawings in Australian Internment Camps during World War II
Aaron Humphrey & Guillaume Vétu
Pages: 273-302
Rev. of Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity
JENNIFER COOKE, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 234pp., £75.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781108779692
Marina Deller
Pages: 303-306
Rev. of Life Writing and the End of Empire: Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives
By EMMA PARKER, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 210 pp., £76.50 (Hardback), ISBN 9781350353794
David Paul Huddart
Virginia Newhall Rademacher, PhD
Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
Chair, Arts and Humanities Division
Babson College
Babson Park, MA 02457
WebEx personal room: https://babson.webex.com/meet/vrademacher
Author Page: Derivative Lives (Bloomsbury, 2022)
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Newsletter Biography Institute, the Netherlands
April 2025
[PDF-version]
The Biography Institute has moved
Last winter, the Biography Institute obtained a new office in the Harmonie complex, room number 1312-132 (address: Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 26, Groningen). From this office, the Institute’s activities will continue as before. After his retirement, Hans Renders has been asked to stay on until someone is appointed as director of the institute.
PhD defense Jacqueline van Paaschen’s biography Marie Tak van Poortvliet
On June 12, 2:30 p.m., Jacqueline van Paaschen-Louwerse will defend her biography of Marie Tak van Poortvliet – and her partner and artist Jacoba van Heemskerk – as a dissertation in the auditorium of the Academy Building. This biography describes the origins and socio-cultural environment of art collector Tak van Poortvliet. A wider perspective of her engagement with the themes of art, politics and agriculture emerges.
Festschrift published by Brill
Recently, David Veltman and Daniel Meister published a liber amicorum in honor of Hans Renders, founder and director of the Biography Institute. Veltman and Meister asked 13 biographers from around the world to reflect on Renders’ significance to biographical research. The volume, titled Biography across the Digitized Globe. Essays in Honour of Hans Renders, is the fourth volume in the Brill series Biography Studies. The foreword by Richard Holmes can be downloaded here. On June 5th, this publication will be presented at the yearly conference of the Biographers International Organization, in the National Press Club in Washington.
The following comments have appeared in the media so far:
• Review Carl Rollyson in the New York Sun.
• Interview Hans Renders in Het Parool [in Dutch].
Two new publications by David Veltman
The journal Secular Studies (Brill) recently featured an essay by David Veltman about the conversion of three Belgian art critics. He also published an entry in the edited collection Jan Walravens en de beeldende kunst, in which all artists will be discussed that are mentioned by the art critic Jan Walravens in his book Hedendaagse schilderkunst in België (1961). This last publication will be launched on April 29, 17:30 PM at the Faculty of Arts of the Sorbonne University, Paris.
Biography conference Buenos Aires
The conference Escribir la Vida: Teoria y Praxis de la Biografía will take place in November 25-26, 2025.
More information can be found on the website www.biografieinstituut.nl.
For subscribing to and unsubscribing from this newsletter, please email biografie.instituut@rug.nl
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The Routledge Companion to Biofiction
Edited by Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen, Michael Lackey. Routledge 2025
The Routledge Companion to Biofiction provides readers with the history, origins, and evolution of this popular genre. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, this authoritative collection foregrounds analyses of biofiction’s core foundations through contemporary debates.
The volume is organised into seven sections: Histories of Biofiction; Theoretical Reflections on Biofiction; Biofiction, National Models and (Trans)National Constructions; Biofiction as Political Intervention; Biofictional Case Studies; Activating Lives: Early Modern Women; and Authorial Reflections. This groundbreaking collection features works that refine our understanding of the genesis and evolution of biofiction; theorize its unique and distinctive modes of signifying; reflect on its value for the future and social justice; chart new approaches for doing biofictional analysis; and offer insights from authors of biofiction into the creative process.
This is the first collection to bring together the two main schools of interpreting biofiction, the Francophone and Anglophone, while also shedding light on biofictions in many languages, from or about many continents, and offering a platform to established and new voices alike. It will be essential reading for students as well as advanced scholars interested in biographical fiction.
Editors
Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She has published on comparative and world literature, biofiction, and modernism and the Middle Ages. Her books include Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012).
Laura Cernat (she/ they) is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, who has published on biofiction, autofiction and autotheory, cultural memory, Virginia Woolf, and Lucia Joyce, and has organized the 2021 conference Biofiction as World Literature.
Alexandre Gefen is ‘Directeur de Recherche’ (Full Research Professor) at the CNRS Theory and History of Modern Art and Literature Laboratory at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture, contemporary literature and literary theory.
Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA, where he teaches courses about twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectual, political and literary history. His publications include Biofiction: An Introduction (Routledge, 2021) and Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (Routledge, 2017).
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Negotiating Biofiction’s Territories – Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen and Michael Lackey
Part I Histories of Biofiction
2. Before Biofiction: Writing Bioi in Greece and Rome – Nora Goldschmidt
3. The Concurrent Rise of Psychology and Biofiction – Michael Lackey
4. Biofiction and Ideologies: Columbiads of the 18th Century – Ina Schabert
Part II Theoretical Reflections on Biofiction
5. Person as Character – Lucia Boldrini
6. Exofiction: A Genre between Mediatic and Literary Practices – Laurent Demanze
7.The Writer’s Life: From Biography to Biofiction – Robert Dion
8. Counterfactual Biofiction: Writing Against History – Alison James
9. Death and Dying in Biofiction – Lorenzo Marchese
10. Biofiction as an Art of the Possible – Hanna Meretoja
11. Witness to the Unattestable – Dominique Rabaté
Part III Biofiction, National Models and (Trans)National Constructions
12. Italian Biofiction – Riccardo Castellana
13. French Biofiction in the Twenty-first Century – Alexandre Gefen
14. Transnationalism and Artist Biofictions – Marleen Rensen
15. Prominence on Stage: Interrogating the Reality of the Self – Silvia Salino
Part IV Biofiction as Political Intervention
16. Biofiction’s Biofabulative Edges – Vilashini Cooppan
17. Perspectivization in Postcolonial Biofiction: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics of Multifocal Narrative – Alexandra Effe
18. The Cultural work of Colonial Wives in Recent Australian Biofictions – Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore
Part V Biofictional Case Studies
19. Haunted by Woolfs: Ghosts in New Bloomsbury Group Biofiction – Todd Avery
20. Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of “New Biography” and the Ethics of Woolf-centric Biofiction – Monica Latham
21. Biofictions and Sport – Andreas Gelz
22. Confronting Evil through Literature: Bolaño, Pron, and Fictional Biography’s Border with Biofiction – Katia Ourachi
23. The Jesus Biofiction in the Twenty-First Century – Stephanie Russo
Part VI Activating Lives: Early Modern Women
24. Women Artists and Agency in Biographical Fiction – Julia Dabbs
25. Beyond the Cage of Facts: Liberating the Subject in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) and The Marriage Portrait (2022) – Bethany Layne
26. Biofiction’s Overlays and Hidden Underpaintings in Lauren Groff’s Matrix and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait – Virginia Rademacher
27. Women and Shakespeare Biofiction – Katherine Scheil
Part VII Authorial Reflections
28. What Happens to the Body Is Real – Anne Enright, Interviewed by Laura Cernat
29. From Small Lives to Biofiction – Pierre Michon, Interviewed by Alexandre Gefen
30. “Strange Labyrinth”: Cultural Politics in Biofiction about
Early Modern Women Authors – Naomi J. Miller
31. Finding the Angle, Finding the Truth – Barbara Mujica
32. The Novel is A Fantastic Playground – Koen Peeters, Interviewed by Laura Cernat
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Two papers and a creative writing piece
We are pleased to announce that the second batch of the current volume (14) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.
Added to the 2024 edition of our journal are the following three papers:
– “What’s Cooking? Mobilizing Women’s Life Narratives in Diasporic Cookbooks ” by Arththi Sathananthar.
– “From Epicureanism to Stoicism: Central European Literary Responses to History of the Twentieth Century and Exile (Sándor Márai, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig)” by Aleksandra Tobiasz.
Also available now is the non-fiction piece “Fractal Fragments: Reflections on Human and More-than-human Matter(s) in the Kogelberg Biosphere, South Africa“, by Mathilda Slabbert, this volume’s first contribution to the Creative Matters section of our journal.
More publications will follow throughout the coming months.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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Biographers in Conversation–with Kate Kennedy–Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Kate Kennedy, a distinguished cellist, musicologist, broadcaster and Director of Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound‘ a hybrid memoir and object, quest and collective biography. https://www.biographersinconversation.com/s02e04-kate-kennedy-cello-a-journey-through-silence-to-sound/
With her beloved cello strapped to her back, Kate crisscrossed Europe by train, retracing the footsteps of four extraordinary cellists from 19th and 20th-century Europe who faced unimaginable hardships, high-stakes situations, persecution and even death camps.
Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together Kate’s reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists.
Kate’s relationship with her cello is complicated. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, to start to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello – and, crucially, the absence of the cello – meant to some other cellists, past and present.
As well as being a historical exploration, Cello is also a profoundly personal one. The book blends memoir, object, collective, and quest biography. This innovative hybrid style enables Kate to weave together the cellists’ life stories with her own experiences and musings, interviews with fellow cellists, and meticulous historical research. It also allows her to describe the cello’s anatomy, voice, personality, spirituality and sensuality.
Kate’s eloquent, lyrical and vibrant storytelling transports us into each scene, making us feel as if we’re in the scene hearing the music and travelling alongside her and the four cellists. Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound is an immersive and deeply personal exploration of the cello’s profound impact on human history and emotion. Through a captivating blend of history, music theory and personal anecdotes, Kate guides us as we embark on a transcendent journey with her and the cello she treasures.
Kate painstakingly pieced together a multiplicity of tiny clues and fragments of evidence from sources dating back to the early nineteenth century. Some examples are concert programs and reviews from the mid-1800s onwards, addresses on old letters, and archives.
During her research, Kate meticulously followed the trail of the four cellists, catching endless trains and travelling in taxis from one historic concert hall or apartment building with taxi drivers who became so fascinated by her quest they joined in the search for clues.
After the introductory chapter, Cello includes four sections Kate aptly named ‘movements’. The first movement is titled ‘Cello’, followed by ‘Journeys’, ‘Silence’ and ‘Sound’. The concluding chapter is titled ‘Encore’. Within each movement are two interludes with titles ‘such as ‘Gazing at the Cello’, ‘Listening to the Cello’, ‘Understanding the Cello’ and ‘The Cello Through Silence to Sound’.
Through the fascinating interludes, Kate draws together the cellists’ life stories with her personal experiences, musings, historical research and a cello’s physical and metaphysical characteristics. Through the interludes, she introduces other voices. We hear from cello makers and dealers, a physicist whose garden houses a cello-turned-bee hive, and cellists such as Steven Isserlis and Christian Poltera. She also includes a deeply moving conversation with Julian Lloyd Webber and his cellist wife, Jiaxin. In 2014, Julian heartbreakingly sold his Stradivari cello after a neck injury forced him to end his career as a solo cellist.
In Cello, Kate explores several themes, including the evolution of the cello and its emotional and spiritual resonance. She also celebrates the contributions and enduring legacies of several celebrated cellists. She reflects on the joys and challenges of mastering the instrument, its profound impact on her life, and the ongoing process of musical discovery and self-expression.
During her epic journey, Kate played the world’s greatest Stradivari. She also played a cello-turned-beehive and a new hybrid cello for youth orchestras in Uruguay. At times, she played her cello in some extraordinary places.
Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound is a profound exploration of resilience, passion, and the indomitable human spirit. Kate’s meticulous research and heartfelt narrative have brought to life the stories of four exceptional cellists who, despite facing unimaginable hardships, found solace and strength in their music.
Throughout her book, Kate shares her personal journey of rediscovery and healing, mirroring the experiences of the cellists whose stories she shared. The tendinitis in her arm thwarted her dream but also opened a new path for her to connect with her ‘first love’ in a deeply powerful way. This personal connection adds a unique and poignant layer to her narrative, making Cello an intensely personal story as well as being a historical account.
Kate’s ability to weave together memoir, object, collective and quest biography into a seamless narrative is truly remarkable. Her lyrical storytelling and graphic sensory details transport readers into the world of each cellist, enabling us to experience the music and the journey alongside her and her biographical subjects. Including voices from cello makers, dealers, and acclaimed cellists such as Steven Isserlis, Julian Lloyd Webber and Christian Poltera further enriches the narrative, portraying the cello kaleidoscopically.
Kate’s deep passion for the cello is palpable, and her insightful analysis of the instrument’s history, its emotional resonance, and its enduring impact on musicians and audiences is captivating. Her unique blend of scholarly research and personal reflection offers a fresh perspective on the cello, moving beyond mere technical analysis to explore its profound connection to the human spirit.
Cello is a timely reminder of the power of music to transcend cultural boundaries, connect us to our deepest emotions, and inspire us to reach for new heights of artistic expression.
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American Eldercide
How It Happened, How to Prevent It
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Margaret Morganroth Gullette
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo236968182.html
A bracing spotlight on the avoidable causes of the COVID-19 Eldercide in the United States.
Twenty percent of the Americans who have died of COVID since 2020 have been older and disabled adults residing in nursing homes—even though they make up fewer than one percent of the US population. Something about this catastrophic loss of life in government-monitored facilities has never added up.
Until now. In American Eldercide, activist and scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette investigates this tragic public health crisis with a passionate voice and razor-sharp attention to detail, showing us that nothing about it was inevitable. By unpacking the decisions that led to discrimination against nursing home residents, revealing how governments, doctors, and media reinforced ageist or ableist biases, and collecting the previously little-heard voices of the residents who survived, Gullette helps us understand the workings of what she persuasively calls an eldercide.
Gullette argues that it was our collective indifference, fueled by the heightened ageism of the COVID-19 era, that prematurely killed this vulnerable population. Compounding that deadly indifference is our own panic about aging and a social bias in favor of youth-based decisions about lifesaving care. The compassion this country failed to muster for the residents of our nursing facilities motivated Gullette to pen an act of remembrance, issuing a call for pro-aging changes in policy and culture that would improve long-term care for everyone.
“A masterpiece. Gullette writes with passion, a critical eye, and an often-sly sense of humor. She shows, in devastating detail, how we as a society failed our elderly population—and the lessons we must learn in order to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.”
—Harry Moody, former Vice President for Academic Affairs, AARP
“With unflinching detail, American Eldercide indicts government indifference and failed regulation during the COVID pandemic. Poignant portraits of real people bring us face to face with individuals who are all our responsibility. This powerful book should be read by anyone who cares about public health, dignified aging, and government accountability.”—
–Katherine S. Newman, author of Downhill From Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality
“Through fierce and evocative prose, Gullette exposes the harsh realities many older adults faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and lays bare the systemic failures and personal tragedies that unfolded. American Eldercide underscores the urgent need to address ageism in our institutions—and ourselves.”
—Tracey Gendron, author of Ageism Unmasked
“A remarkable and vivid description of one of the worst chapters in the history of nursing homes—orchestrated by corporate greed and profiteering. It is a wake-up call for the need for total reform or elimination of the institutions where older people are sent to die without dignity or care.”
—Charlene Harrington, University of California, San Francisco
“In her incendiary new book, Gullette explains why the deaths of over 150,000 residents of nursing facilities were preventable, laying out the governmental failures and intersecting biases that legitimized their appalling abandonment. Ultimately, she places those lost residents where they rightly belong: at the center of a shared vision of a better future for us all.”
—Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks
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Autosociobiography: A Literary Phenomenon and Its Global Entanglements
Bielefeld: transcript 2025.
Johanna Bundschuh-van Duikeren, Marie Jacquier, Peter Löffelbein (eds.).
The volume is available open access at https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7258-9/autosociobiography/?number=978-3-8376-7258-9
Autosociobiography, a term coined by nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux, is recognized as a productive literary phenomenon at the intersection of literary representation, social analysis and political commentary. The contributors to this volume trace the global entanglements of autosociobiographical texts, especially the historical, social and transcultural dynamics they discuss, represent and perform. They critically engage with the question of how to expand the scope of autosociobiography beyond its current corpus and class narratives to include other forms of social exclusion and stratification.
Contents
On the Globality of Autosociobiography
An Introduction
Johanna Bundschuh-van Duikeren, Marie Jacquier, and Peter Löffelbein …………….7
Thing, or Not a Thing?
Reading for the Autosocial in Life Narrative
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson …………………………………………….. 35
Towards a Theory of Minor Subjectivation
Global Perspectives in the Work of Didier Eribon
Christina Ernst ……………………………………………………………. 61
Towards an Intersectional Autosociobiography
Diversifying Perspectives on the Works of Annie Ernaux and Mely Kiyak
Thekla Noschka ……………………………………………………………77
Reading across Borders
Autosociobiography and Dalit Autobiography at the Intersections
of Class, Caste, and Gender
Mrunmayee Sathye ………………………………………………………. 103
Reversing Class Defection
Two Ionian Tales of Gender, Nation, and Woe
Michail Leivadiotis …………………………………………………………125
Autosociobiography and the Temporalities of Class
The Works of Kerry Hudson and Darren McGarvey
Peter Löffelbein …………………………………………………………..143
Writing the (Communal) Self in Spanish Contemporary Fiction
Family, Class, and Generation in Manuel Vilas and Carlos Pardo
Jobst Welge ……………………………………………………………… 161
A Japanese Pioneer of Autosociobiography?
Nakano Kōji’s Memoirs of Adolescence
Christopher Schelletter …………………………………………………… 183
On the Margin of Literature
Polish Life Writing Competitions in the Context of Autosociobiography
Paweł Rodak ……………………………………………………………. 205
Autosociobiographies as a Way of Writing Social Life
Lagasnerie’s 3 between Literature and Sociology
Marc Ortmann …………………………………………………………… 227
List of contributors …………………………………………………….. 245
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Book by a List Member–Reframing My Worth: Memoir of a Bangladeshi-Canadian Woman
Reframing My Worth: Memoir of a Bangladeshi-Canadian Woman
By Habiba Zaman, Professor Emeritus, GSWS
In this book, I share my personal memories and lived experiences of growing up in Bangladesh and my Canadian journey. It is neither an autobiography nor a chronological account of life, rather I focus on selected themes and stories through critical self-reflection within the gendered social, cultural and historical contexts. The stories as they unfold may take the readers on an emotional journey with feelings and events of their own.
Reframing My Worth is a story about forging our own path in life and never letting the challenges along the way keep us from achieving our dreams. This book may be of interest to those studying gendered socialization, migration, and women’s rights in cross-national perspectives.
(https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000437324071/Habiba-Zaman-Reframing-My-Worth)
Dr. Habiba Zaman was born and raised in Bangladesh, later immigrating to Canada where she taught at several Canadian universities. She is a professor emeritus in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. During her teaching years, Habiba organized several conferences, including Canada 150 Conference on Migration of Bengalis and Canadian South Asian Youth Conference.
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Welcome to Season Two of Biographers in Conversation, a podcast about the multiplicity of choices biographers make while crafting life stories. In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, multi-award-winning author Anna Funder chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the every day, Anna Funder slipped into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watched him create his writing self, she tried to remember her own…
Wifedom
Wifedom, which has just been awarded France’s most prestigious literary award, resurrects Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a brilliant Oxford graduate who married George Orwell in 1936. As well as oppressing, suppressing and subjugating Eileen, Orwell omitted her from his published works and private notebooks. His six male biographers also unconsciously or consciously wrote her out of Orwell’s life story.
When Anna Funder uncovered Orwell’s forgotten wife, it was a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she written out of the story?
Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend Norah, Anna Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolled up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she was led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it is to be a wife.
So, she will live writing the letters she did – six to her best friend, and three to her husband. I know where she was when she wrote them. I know that the dishes were frozen in the sink, that she was bleeding, that he was in bed with another woman – and she knew it . . . I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set – the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.
In Wifedom, Anna restored Eileen’s visibility and voice. Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Wifedom is so well respected it’s been published in 20 countries and translated into 16 languages.
Wifedom reflects Anna Funder’s deep commitment to restoring Eileen’s voice and visibility. By incorporating her letters and crafting a narrative that blends memoir, biography, and literary criticism, Anna portrayed Eileen sensitively and in a multidimensional way. Through Wifedom, she not only challenged the traditional biographical form, but also highlighted the systemic biases that have historically silenced women’s contributions, especially those of a wife. Wifedom stands as a testament to the importance of re-examining history through a more inclusive lens, ensuring that voices like Eileen’s are heard and remembered.
Praise for Wifedom
Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments – historical and cultural – of the twentieth century.
Geraldine Brooks
There’s exhilaration in reading every brilliant word.
Chloe Hooper
One of the most startling explorations of life-writing (Eileen’s, Orwell’s and Funder’s) in recent times . . . Wifedom is a genre-bending tour-de-force that resurrects an invisible woman, and relitigates the saintly image of the man she called ‘Eric’ . . . a moving, forensic act of biographical reconstruction.
Robert McCrum, The Independent
A virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose.
Sarah Bakewell, New York Times
Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies
Founder, Share your life story
gabriella@shareyourlifestory.com.au
0408 256 381
www.shareyourlifestory.com.au
Listen to my weekly podcast Biographers in Conversation about the choices biographers make while researching, writing and publishing their books: https://www.biographersinconversation.com/
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David Veltman and Daniel R. Meister, eds.,
Biography Across the Digitized Globe: Essays in Honour of Hans Renders
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2025)
The Biography Institute (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) is pleased to announce the publication of a festschrift in honor of our founding director, professor Hans Renders. Renders embodies the international spirit of biography both through his own research as a biographer as well as his unparalleled leadership in the global community of biographers. In keeping with his international focus, David Veltman and Daniel R. Meister, the editors of this volume, asked 13 biographers from around the world to reflect on the dual challenges of the proliferation of digitized sources and increasingly international, transnational, and cosmopolitan lives.
The essays that were written as a response to this call are now published under the title of Biography across the Digitized Globe. The collection includes pieces by Nigel Hamilton, Richard Holmes, Craig Howes, Marlene Kadar, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Daniel R. Meister, Melanie Nolan, Jacques Pienaar, Maryam Thirriard, Jeffrey Tyssens, David Veltman, and Lodewijk Verduin. Each contribution answers the call in different ways, but all in some way draw upon the theoretical foundation that Renders has established under biography as an academic discipline. Each also echoes his lifelong urge for question-driven research in biography, with ample reference to the source material that supports a given hypothesis. Taken as a whole, the volume forces us to ask: if the digital turn has brought us a world of transnational, interlinked research data, has it also ushered in a new kind of biography? And if so, what is its nature?
ISBN 978-90-04-72671-0
EUR €125.35
Available as Hardback and Ebook
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Discount offer for Reading Autobiography Now: A Streamlined Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives–Smith and Watson
Reading Autobiography Now: A Streamlined Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Third, much revised and expanded edition, 2024 (2010, 2001) is currently featured in the University of Minnesota Press Literary Studies sale, which runs through April 1: after adding the book to their shopping cart, customers on their website can save 30% by entering the code MN92380 at checkout.
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Dear colleagues, dear friends,
I am writing to share that our volume, Autotheories (co-edited with Vilashini Cooppan) comes out today with the MIT Press. The book offers a new frame of reference for autotheory and its genre-bending synthesis of autobiography and critical theory. Transgressing generic boundaries and bridging stylistic registers, the volume underscores autotheory’s multiple genealogies while situating it against the contemporary political field.
We’ve been excited to see Autotheories appear on The Millions most anticipated list for the season and receive a CHOICE Selection for Noteworthy Titles. I got to speak with Lena Mattheis on the Queer Lit podcast about the history of the genre, and an episode of Theoryish is forthcoming. Vilashini, our contributors, and I will be doing both in-person and hybrid launch events and we hope you’ll join us:
- Saturday March 1: Online symposium on “Autotheory: Encounters, Embodiments, Critique” through City Lights Bookstore.
- Tuesday, March 4: Reception/Launch Party City Lights Bookstore in person in San Francisco from 7-8:30pm PST.
- March 6-8: “Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn” conference at UC Santa Cruz.
Additional launch plans are underway in London, Paris, and Edinburgh this spring and New York and Philadelphia in the fall. If you’d like more details or if you’d like to organize an event at your institution, local bookstore, or for your class, please let me know. I would love to speak about the book and/or autotheory more generally.
Today (Feb. 18), you can use MITP30 for 30% off when you order the book through Penguin Random House with a US mailing address. Beyond today, you can use READMIT20 for 20% off orders through Penguin with a US mailing address.
I look forward to future collaborations as the field grows. Thanks in advance for thinking with us and helping to launch this project into the world. I would love to hear what you think!
Sincerely,
Alex Brostoff
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“This is the book on autotheory we have been waiting for.”
—Heather Love, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania; author of Underdogs: Queer Theory and Social Deviance
Edited by Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan
Available: February 18, 2025
Autotheories tells the story of a field in formation. Building on traditions that have long fused life writing, philosophical encounter, embodied theorizing, and cultural critique, autotheory constructs new practices of critical theory. Transgressing generic boundaries and bridging stylistic registers, it crafts language that is intimate, analytic, playful, and insurgent. Editors Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan underscore autotheory’s multiple genealogies and genre-bending forms while situating it within the contemporary political field. In this collection, autotheory emerges as a strut (of style), a straddle (of disciplines), a proliferation (of selves), an axis (of identifications), an index (of attachments), and an archive (of loves).
An assemblage and an experience, Autotheories surveys the field’s iterations and permutations. Without settling for classification or bowing to ossification, Autotheories invites you to its discursive play.
Contributors include: Alex Brostoff, Jessica Bush, Judith Butler, Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Jan Grue, Emma Lieber, Megan Moodie, Lili Owen Rowlands, John Patterson, Paul B. Preciado, Erica Richardson, Migueltzinta C. Solís, Jamieson Webster, Damon Ross Young, Stacey Young, Arianne Zwartjes
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Alex Brostoff (they/them)
Assistant Professor of English
Kenyon College
•
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
University of Edinburgh
•
Co-editor of Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025)
Co-translator of Ailton Krenak’s Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024)
Co-translator of Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023)
Associate Editor of College Literature
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BSA Auto/Biography study group: Seminars, Summer Conference Call for Papers and Membership
Dear Friends
We hope all is well and 2025 has got off a to a good start for you.
ONLINE SEMINARS:
Thanks to Yvonne Jewkes for such an interesting and thought-provoking first seminar of 2025. Registration is open for next week’s seminar, as well as the March and May events, with the links below. Just a reminder that seminars are free to paid BSA or Auto/Biography Study Group members (see below). There is a £10 charge for non-members.
• Wednesday 5th February 2025 at 1700-1800: Ghostwriting and the impossibility of auto/biography with Leslie Gardner (University of Essex): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/ghostwriting-and-the-impossibility-of-autobiography/. Registration closes on Monday 3rd February at 23:59.
• Thursday 6th March 2025 at 1700-1800: Tomato Sauce Splattered Selves: Subjectivity in Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires with Elisabeth Lechner (University of Vienna, Austria): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/tomato-sauce-splattered-selves-subjectivity-in-rebecca-may-johnson-s-small-fires/. Registration closes on Tuesday 4th March at 23:59.
• Wednesday 7th May 2025 at 1700-1800: Keeping Mum or freeing the Madwoman in the Attic? Challenging the patriarchy, gathering voice and seeking change in conversation with my foremothers and Hélène Cixous with Jan Bradford (Independent Academic): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/keeping-mum-or-freeing-the-madwoman-in-the-attic/ Registration closes on Monday 5th May at 23:59.
SUMMER CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS:
The Auto/Biography Study Group Summer Conference, ‘Home’, will take place on 16th-18th July 2025 at Venue Reading, University of Reading. Dr Jackie Goode (Visiting Fellow at Loughborough University) will give the keynote entitled: ‘A Life in Seven Moves: Stories of Loss, Grief Work and Coming Home to Self’.
We invite abstract submissions (250 words) for 30/35-minute oral presentations followed by discussion and for installation pieces. The submission deadline is 10th March 2025 at 5pm: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/brunel/bsa-auto-biography-study-group-summer-conference-2025-abstract-. The detailed call is attached.
Key dates leading up to the conference are as follows:
• Abstract submission deadline: 10th March at 5pm.
• Abstract notification and conference registration opens week beginning: 28th March.
• Presenter booking deadline: 5th May.
• Delegate booking deadline: 2nd June.
• Conference: 16th – 18th July.
Registration includes ensuite accommodation and full board: BSA Member Registration: £450, Auto/Biography Study Group Member Registration: £460, Non-Member Registration: £490.
Please contact gayle.letherby@plymouth.ac.uk and/or seerya@tcd.ie with any queries about the conference.
WINTER CONFERENCE:
Departure and Transformation: Auto/Biography Study Group Winter Conference, 12th December 2025 at Friends House, Euston, London. Further details, call for papers and registration to follow.
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY STUDY GROUP MEMBERSHIP:
The 2025 Auto/Biography Study Group membership is open to payment via PayPal by logging in or by debit/credit card and choosing to pay as a guest. Membership gives free entry to our seminars, reduced conference registrations costs and free publication in Auto/Biography, the group’s open access online journal:
https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/autobiography-membership/
Look forward to seeing you soon.
Anne Chappell and Carly Stewart
Auto/Biography Study Group Convenors
Email: anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk and cstewart@bournemouth.ac.uk
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group on X: @AutoBiographySG
Join the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/join-us/
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Short Diary Fiction
A New Global Anthology
Edited by Desirée Henderson & Tracey Daniels-Lerberg
Available from Bloomsbury Publishers this month, Short Diary Fiction: A New Global Anthology collects 20 short stories that fall under the category of “diary fiction” — though their engagement with the diary is diverse and creative. Some stories borrow the conventional structure and voice of the personal diary, while others employ diaries as plot devices or symbolic objects. The stories range from the nineteenth century to the present and are gathered from around the world. Together, they demonstrate the historic, global, and stylistic range of the genre.
Diaries capture the most intimate and revealing aspects of diarists’ perception of themselves and the world around them. Throughout history, fiction writers have turned to the diary genre to maximize the intimacy and credibility of their narratives and to tell stories that bridge the personal and the social.
This collection is the first to make visible the historical and global scope of short stories that use diaries as a structuring form or thematic inspiration. The book gathers twenty stories that span three centuries, from ten different countries and seven different languages. Although written in a range of styles from Romanticism to science fiction to Gothic to climate fiction, these stories cohere around key diary themes: privacy and publicity, self-discovery and self-delusion, love and sexuality, gender roles and social codes, time and technology, among others.The collection includes a scholarly introduction to diary fiction; headnotes framing each story; and a list of additional recommended reading. The stories selected are fascinating, entertaining, and highly teachable, and would make a great addition to any class on diaries, autobiography, autofiction, or global literatures.
Daniels-Lerberg and Henderson’s anthology makes a valuable intervention in literary history by illustrating the popularity of diary fiction across the globe and in diverse literary traditions. At the intersection of autobiographical self-narrative and riveting storytelling, these works of diary fiction promise to entertain, inform, and spark new ideas in both readers and keepers of diaries.
Desirée Henderson is Professor of English at the University of Texas Arlington, USA, where she specializes in American literature, life writing, and women’s writing.
Tracey Daniels-Lerberg is Assistant Professor (Lecturer) and Associate Writing Program Administrator, University of Utah, USA. where she focuses on feminist rhetoric, American literature, and women’s representations in literature and film.
“Fantastic collection of short diary fiction from around the world. The reader discovers the many ingenious ways in which writers, ranging from Henry James to Mpho Phalwane, have used the diary form and the idea of the diary in stories. The editors’ introduction to the anthology provides helpful background and context, and each individual selection has its own informative. introduction.”
Lorna Martens, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Virginia, USA
The book is available for pre-order here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/short-diary-fiction-9781350348073/
*Use the following discount codes to save 20% on bloomsbury.com/9781350348066. Valid until April 1, 2025
UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, South and Central America: DIARY20
USA: DIARY20
Canada: DIARY20
Australia and New Zealand: DIARY20
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European Journal of Life Writing–Volume 14 out now!
We are pleased to announce that the first articles of volume 14 of the European Journal of Life Writing are now online. The 2025 edition of the journal is off to a great start with the papers “Time and The Diary in Captivity, a Case Study: The Diary of Fela Szeps (1942-1944)” by Batsheva Ben-Amos and “Writing under the ‘Auto/biographical Demand’ in Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox (2012) and Exodus (2015)” by Szidonia Haragos.
Also online now, are a book review of Samira Saramo’ Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans by Lynn Domina and Anna Poletti’s Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book by
Mārtiņš Kaprāns.
As always, you are cordially invited to publish your life writing research, book reviews and creative matters in our journal. Guidelines can be found here or you can contact us at ejlw@rug.nl if you have any questions about the process.
Warm regards, also on behalf of the journal’s board and editorial team,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Journal ManagerVisit our website to read the full announcement.
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| Life Writing, Volume 22, Issue 1, March 2025 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online. This new issue contains the following articles: |
| Essays My Diary Diary |  Laura Bissell Pages: 1-25 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2273358 Ghost Plants: The Possibilities of Botanical Ecobiography | Nicole Hodgson Pages: 26-36 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2323942 Articles Witnessing Con/Text(s) and Narrativizing Subjectivities: Rhetorical Questions in Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary Ayesha Zahoor & Rabia Aamir Pages: 37-54 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2375657 Enduring Places and Excavating Memories: Biographical Narratives of Delhi in Malvika Singh’s Perpetual City (2013) Neha Kumari & Manoj Kumar Yadav Pages: 55-74 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2327617 New York-letters: An Ode to New York, a Panegyric to Persia Hossein Nazari Pages: 75-86 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2326907 ‘An Awakening of the Senses’: Reading Julia Child’s My Life in France as Gastrography | Lucy O’Connor Pages: 87-104 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2252995 The Myth of ‘Wound’ Writing: The Multiple Surfaces of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow Gretchen Shirm Pages: 105-121 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2257903 Wounded Poetry Hands: The Poetics of Agha Shahid Ali Junaid Shah Shabir Pages: 122-137 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2284703 Traversing the (In)Visible Territory of Schizophrenia in HOAX Psychosis Blues: An Intersection of Life Writing and Graphic Medicine in Comics Shefali & Preeti Puri Pages: 138-157 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2289467 Trans/national(ism) in Chinese Trans Memoir: Jin Xing’s Shanghai Tango and Lei Ming’s Life Beyond My Body Ana Horvat Pages: 158-176 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2313196 The Book, the Camera, and the Concept of Dust in Life Writing by Patti Smith Teresa Bruś Pages: 177-192 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2313192 Handling Hazardous Biographical Materials: Dealing with Questionable Character Traits through Poetic Biography | Jessica L. Wilkinson Pages: 193-214 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2323931 Making a Narrative of Repetition: Diachronicity and the Second-Person Address in YouTube’s Routine Videos | Veera Valta Pages: 215-234 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2324997 The Life and Death, and Life of William Mackay | Michael Titlestad Pages: 235-246 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2326546 Reviews Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel by Claus Elholm Andersen, Albany, SUNY Press, 2023, 243pp., ISBN9781438495668 Rikke Andersen Kraglund Pages: 247-250 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2343533 Duty to Presence by Lily Robert-Foley, Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex (France), Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, October 13, 2022, 174 pp., ISBN: 979-10-240-1713-6 Nancy Reddy Pages: 251-254 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2330136 Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, with Eugenie Theuer, series edited by Clare Brant and Max Saunders, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2024, 397 pp, ISBN 2730-9185 Gay Lynch Pages: 255-257 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2315870 Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel by Fiona J. Doloughan, 1st edition. London, New York, Anthem Press, 2023, 180 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781839983375 Tijana Przulj Pages: 258-260 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2296174 Our Hearts are Restless: the Art of Spiritual Memoir by Richard Lischer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, 379 pp., ISBN 9780197649046 Rebecca Styler Pages: 261-263 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2329402 |
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Final publications for the 2024 volume of the European Journal of Life Writing
Dear all,
Today, the final two publications were added to volume 13.
– “Inside the Lives of Comedians — Or Not: Signs of Constructedness and Referentiality in Stand-Up Comedy“, by Ida Marie Munck.
– “Queer Tango“, a contribution to our Creative Matters section by Dylan Jonas Stone.
With that, we round up the thirteenth volume of our journal. This year, we published thirteen regular academic papers, a cluster on medical humanities containing a further four papers plus introduction, four extensive book reviews, and four creative pieces. With that, I think we can say 2024 was a fruitful year for the European Journal of Life Writing. You can find the entire volume here.
If this email finds you in the northern hemisphere, I wish you a restful winter break, and happy holidays for those who celebrate.
I am already looking forward to starting volume 14, for which the first batch of publications is already expected in late January. For the coming weeks, responses to emails and submissions may be delayed somewhat, for which we hope for your understanding.
Please note that from January 1 onwards, the journal has switched to Chicago Style referencing. Please see our submissions page and style guide for more information.
All the best,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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Three new articles added to volume 13 of the European Journal of Life Writing
We are pleased to announce that the fifth batch of the current volume (13) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.
Added to the 2024 edition of our journal are the following three papers:
– “Hand-Reading: New Pointers for Life Writing” by Babs Boter & Alexandra Nagel
– “A Woman Haunted: How Graphic Biofiction Revises Mary Shelley’s Early Feminist Life” by Maria Juko
– “We Were There: Individual, Social, and Cultural Memory in Punk Memoirs by Women” by Cristina Garrigós.
We expect one final batch before the end of the year.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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| Life Writing, Volume 21, Issue 4, December 2024 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online This new issue contains the following articles: |
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Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present by Eleanor Paynter, is out with the University of California Press, in their Critical Refugee Studies series.
Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present by Eleanor Paynter, is out with the University of California Press, in their Critical Refugee Studies series. It’s available in paperback and open-access versions: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/emergency-in-transit/paper
Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe’s so-called “migrant crisis” from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights.
Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.
Reviews
“This excellent book, while focused on the oppressive tentacles of what Eleanor Paynter calls the ’emergency apparatus,’ navigates its way through the at times haunting accounts of survivors of the Mediterranean crossings, the forms of protest crafted in elegy to its victims, and the many literary and other artistic productions that document a rich and vibrant emergent cultural world often all but silenced in popular discourse. Paynter unearths the many symbols and tokens of a transformation of Italian society that many struggle to ignore: the fragments of shipwrecks, the ubiquitous detention centers, and the national commemoration of the loss of victims at sea that all signal a society caught in its own web of forgetting.”—Donald Martin Carter, author of Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility
“Exploring the multiple dimensions of danger that compose the transit of migrants to and in Italy, Paynter lays bare the workings of an emergency apparatus that perpetuates itself. But this passionate and timely book does something more than that. Mining memories and testimonies, it illuminates possibilities for a different future.”—Sandro Mezzadra, coauthor of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (with Brett Neilson)
“Emergency in Transit brilliantly shows how emergency, as both a logic and an operation, ushers in a new age in Italy wherein virulent and violent forms of racism are given space to play out. This beautifully written book also holds space for the voices, texts, films, and sounds that serve as witness and testimony to this pernicious age. In so doing, Paynter expands the possibilities of agency for the many who are caught up in the churn of the emergency apparatus of migration.”—Stephanie Malia Hom, University of California, Santa Barbara
____________
Eleanor Paynter
Assistant Professor
Italian, Migration, and Global Media Studies
Friendly Hall 105A
Department of Romance Languages
School of Global Studies and Languages
University of Oregon
Research and related projects
Book: Emergency in Transit (University of California Press)
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The Routledge Companion to Biofiction
Edited by Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen, Michael Lackey. Routledge 2025
The Routledge Companion to Biofiction provides readers with the history, origins, and evolution of this popular genre. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, this authoritative collection foregrounds analyses of biofiction’s core foundations through contemporary debates.
The volume is organised into seven sections: Histories of Biofiction; Theoretical Reflections on Biofiction; Biofiction, National Models and (Trans)National Constructions; Biofiction as Political Intervention; Biofictional Case Studies; Activating Lives: Early Modern Women; and Authorial Reflections. This groundbreaking collection features works that refine our understanding of the genesis and evolution of biofiction; theorize its unique and distinctive modes of signifying; reflect on its value for the future and social justice; chart new approaches for doing biofictional analysis; and offer insights from authors of biofiction into the creative process.
This is the first collection to bring together the two main schools of interpreting biofiction, the Francophone and Anglophone, while also shedding light on biofictions in many languages, from or about many continents, and offering a platform to established and new voices alike. It will be essential reading for students as well as advanced scholars interested in biographical fiction.
Editors
Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She has published on comparative and world literature, biofiction, and modernism and the Middle Ages. Her books include Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012).
Laura Cernat (she/ they) is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, who has published on biofiction, autofiction and autotheory, cultural memory, Virginia Woolf, and Lucia Joyce, and has organized the 2021 conference Biofiction as World Literature.
Alexandre Gefen is ‘Directeur de Recherche’ (Full Research Professor) at the CNRS Theory and History of Modern Art and Literature Laboratory at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture, contemporary literature and literary theory.
Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA, where he teaches courses about twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectual, political and literary history. His publications include Biofiction: An Introduction (Routledge, 2021) and Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (Routledge, 2017).
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Negotiating Biofiction’s Territories – Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen and Michael Lackey
Part I Histories of Biofiction
2. Before Biofiction: Writing Bioi in Greece and Rome – Nora Goldschmidt
3. The Concurrent Rise of Psychology and Biofiction – Michael Lackey
4. Biofiction and Ideologies: Columbiads of the 18th Century – Ina Schabert
Part II Theoretical Reflections on Biofiction
5. Person as Character – Lucia Boldrini
6. Exofiction: A Genre between Mediatic and Literary Practices – Laurent Demanze
7.The Writer’s Life: From Biography to Biofiction – Robert Dion
8. Counterfactual Biofiction: Writing Against History – Alison James
9. Death and Dying in Biofiction – Lorenzo Marchese
10. Biofiction as an Art of the Possible – Hanna Meretoja
11. Witness to the Unattestable – Dominique Rabaté
Part III Biofiction, National Models and (Trans)National Constructions
12. Italian Biofiction – Riccardo Castellana
13. French Biofiction in the Twenty-first Century – Alexandre Gefen
14. Transnationalism and Artist Biofictions – Marleen Rensen
15. Prominence on Stage: Interrogating the Reality of the Self – Silvia Salino
Part IV Biofiction as Political Intervention
16. Biofiction’s Biofabulative Edges – Vilashini Cooppan
17. Perspectivization in Postcolonial Biofiction: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics of Multifocal Narrative – Alexandra Effe
18. The Cultural work of Colonial Wives in Recent Australian Biofictions – Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore
Part V Biofictional Case Studies
19. Haunted by Woolfs: Ghosts in New Bloomsbury Group Biofiction – Todd Avery
20. Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of “New Biography” and the Ethics of Woolf-centric Biofiction – Monica Latham
21. Biofictions and Sport – Andreas Gelz
22. Confronting Evil through Literature: Bolaño, Pron, and Fictional Biography’s Border with Biofiction – Katia Ourachi
23. The Jesus Biofiction in the Twenty-First Century – Stephanie Russo
Part VI Activating Lives: Early Modern Women
24. Women Artists and Agency in Biographical Fiction – Julia Dabbs
25. Beyond the Cage of Facts: Liberating the Subject in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) and The Marriage Portrait (2022) – Bethany Layne
26. Biofiction’s Overlays and Hidden Underpaintings in Lauren Groff’s Matrix and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait – Virginia Rademacher
27. Women and Shakespeare Biofiction – Katherine Scheil
Part VII Authorial Reflections
28. What Happens to the Body Is Real – Anne Enright, Interviewed by Laura Cernat
29. From Small Lives to Biofiction – Pierre Michon, Interviewed by Alexandre Gefen
30. “Strange Labyrinth”: Cultural Politics in Biofiction about
Early Modern Women Authors – Naomi J. Miller
31. Finding the Angle, Finding the Truth – Barbara Mujica
32. The Novel is A Fantastic Playground – Koen Peeters, Interviewed by Laura Cernat
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Biofiction/Boldrini-Cernat-Gefen-Lackey/p/book/9781032526171?srsltid=AfmBOoqCHll1bMB-pS-pvztvop-FjNqSVt6PrOiDOEXuxZma6v03EYUA&fbclid=IwY2xjawGkTYhleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHTXL0VJF_IzfsS1avB8DvRdVT_XwSnHGmfuRt2tbypVOwDoTuiqunCir0w_aem_wWwgwejKqtk2J8i-aoypsQ
Reframing Indigenous Biography. Routledge, 2025.
Edited by Shino Konishi, Malcolm Allbrook, and Tom Griffiths
This book explores the history, practice, and possibilities of writing about the lives of First Nations’ peoples in Australia as well as Aotearoa New Zealand, North America, and the Pacific.
This interdisciplinary collection recognises the limitations of Western biographical conventions for writing Indigenous long‑ and short‑form biographies. Through a series of diverse life stories of both historical and contemporary First Nations figures, this book investigates innovative ways to ameliorate the challenges we face in recovering the stories of Indigenous people and reimagining their lives in productive new ways. Many of the chapters in this collection are deeply reflective, aiming not just to relate the life story of an individual but also to reflect on the archival, intellectual, and emotional journeys that biographers undertake in researching Indigenous biography.
This volume will be of value to scholars and students interested in Indigenous Studies, biography, history, literature, creative writing, archaeology, and colonial and postcolonial studies.
Editors
Shino Konishi FAHA is a Yawuru historian and Associate Professor in the School of Indigenous Studies and School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012) and The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A Biographical History of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island (2023) with Ann Curthoys and Alexandra Ludewig.
Malcolm Allbrook is Managing Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Editor of the Australian Journal of Biography and History, and Senior Lecturer in history at the Australian National University. His most recent book is Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand (with Sophie Scott‑Brown, 2021).
Tom Griffiths AO FAHA is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University. His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics, and journalism and include Hunters and Collectors (1996) and The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (2016).
Table of Contents
1. Reframing Indigenous biography: an introduction
Shino Konishi, Malcolm Allbrook, and Tom Griffiths
Life stories: Mungo Lady and Mungo Man
Malcolm Allbrook
Part 1: Re-imagining Indigenous biography
2. Biographies of the Dreaming
Malcolm Allbrook, Tom Griffiths and Shino Konishi
3. Lives and lands in exquisite balance; Māori biography in the ‘now-time’
Arini Loader
4. Indigenous biographies without borders
Alice Te Punga Somerville
Life stories: Maria Welch (c. 1834–1909)
Mandy Paul
Ooloogan, George John Noble (c. 1840–1928)
Laurie Bamblett and Wendy Bunn
Nangar (c. 1848–1927)
Laurie Bamblett
Part 2: Reconstructing Indigenous Lives
5. Reframing the Tahitian archipelago: insights from the whole lives of Tupaia, Purea, and Hitihiti
Kate Fullagar
6. The life and afterlife of Yagan: a corporeal biography
Shino Konishi
7. Nah Doongh’s story
Grace Karskens
8. His walking feet
Jill Giese
Life stories: Tommy Chaseland (c. 1800–1869)
Lynette Russell
Undelya (Minnie) Apma (c. 1909–1990)
Kath Apma Travis Penangke
Lisa Marie Bellear (1961–2006)
Kim Kruger
Part 3: The biographers’ journeys
9. Re-centring Native American history: biography transformed
Michael A. McDonnell
10. Finding Australia’s ‘Missing’ Pacific women
Katerina Teaiwa, Nicholas Hoare, and Talei Luscia Mangioni
11. In conversation about Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth
Alexis Wright and Tom Griffiths
12. Collective living-legacies of Aunty Gladys Elphick and the Council for Aboriginal Women in South Australia
Natalie Harkin
Life stories: The Wild Australia Show (1892-1893)
Michael Aird, Lindy Allen, Chantal Knowles, Paul Memmott, Maria Nugent, and Jonathan Richards
https://www.routledge.com/Reframing-Indigenous-Biography/Konishi-Allbrook-Griffiths/p/book/9781032398938?srsltid=AfmBOoooYSSBaVK_meOB5d6RFM47DGU-yLJy6Ebk8dHB_oUCBnp71RWp&fbclid=IwY2xjawGg_NpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQl00-w_Um7pBg1wmUrnwCuZllkjaJh8jle1bDC77BF_6NMeUp8XxvOA8Q_aem_HH7Qrve8HiDL6mIaSzbwBQ
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Editorial Vacancies / Opportunities — The European Journal of Life Writing (EJLW)
Dear IABA Reader,
The Board of Trustees of the European Journal of Life Writing (EJLW) is inviting applications for two positions in its core editorial team, responsible for the day-to-day running of the journal.
Assistant Journal Manager
The assistant journal manager works together with the journal manager and a second assistant journal manager on the following tasks:
- Managing the production process, from the submission of articles until publication;
- Communicating with authors, editors, and external reviewers;
- The lay-out of the publications;
- Announcing publications on social media.
This is a volunteer job, for which an annual allowance of €300 is available to cover expenses.
Manager of Book Reviews
The journal’s manager of book reviews is responsible for assessing submitted book reviews, but also pro-actively commissioning book reviews on new publications in the field of life writing. This includes the following tasks:
- Approaching reviewers and agreeing on deadlines
- Managing the production process, from the submission of articles until publication
- Communicating with reviewers
- Contacting publishers for review copies
- Review in-coming book reviews, together with a second member of the editorial team
- The lay-out of book reviews
This is a volunteer job, for which an annual allowance of €400 is available to cover expenses.
Expressions of interest, consisting of a motivation letter and curriculum vitae, can be sent to ejlw@rug.nl.
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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Lebano-Pathography: Converging Pathologies and Lived Narratives since August 4, 2020. Edited by Sleiman El Hajj. Routledge, 2024.
This book of autobiographical, autoethnographic illness narratives tackles the intersection between cultural and medical illnesses in present-day Lebanon, in relation to topical issues such as queer home, coming of age, dementia, expatriate trauma, and sexual blackmail, among others. The book’s essays are developed in the backdrop of Lebano-pathography – a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, narrative intervention (form/method) that does not depoliticise the traumatic subject. The chapters in this book were originally published in Life Writing and are accompanied by a new conclusion.
Reviews:
“Sleiman El Hajj brings together social and medical pathologies of illness which fill a lacuna in Arab Middle Eastern literature, in various ways reflecting, subverting, intoning, queering, and fragmenting ‘the dominant discourses in Lebanese patriarchy’ – along with its sexist, xenophobic, and ableist abominations of sexual blackmail, pathologised queerness, disordered memories, Alzheimer, medical malpractice, immigrant narratives, vicarious traumas, and mental health crises. This is defiant writing, persuasively putting the case for meaning making beyond the conventional diktats of verification through a lens of a reified objectivity. The book instead offers an authenticity that dares to subvert academic orthodoxies of knowledge production while bearing unflinching depictions of individual lives lived under dystopian conditions.”
Maria Jaschok, University of Oxford
“This original and engaging volume offers a diagnosis of contemporary Lebanon in the aftermath of the devastating 2020 port blast in Beirut, bringing together a macro perspective on political-economic breakdown with highly personal and heartfelt life stories of personal illness amidst public pain. Lebanon’s recent traumas are stark and specific, as the book attests, but they also resonate with how politics has become pathological in many parts of the world. In this context, the contributors’ autobiographical narration across scales from the mind and body to the city and nation offers creative and intellectual paths towards a therapeutic reckoning with the deepening ills of our shared present.”
Ruben Andersson, University of Oxford
Table of Contents
Introduction – Theorising Lebano-Pathography: A Biographical Exploration of Medical-Cultural Pathologies
Sleiman El Hajj
Part I – Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex
1. Narrating Sexual Blackmail in Lebanon: A Present-Day Pathography
Sleiman El Hajj
2. No Cure: Illness through a Lebanese Arab Queer Lens
Anthony El G.
Part II – The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure
3. On the Vulnerability of Memory and the Power of Storytelling, or How My Grandmothers Made Me a Historian
Sana Tannoury-Karam
4. Writing Pretty: On Self-Cannibalism and Disfigured Tongues
Natacha Yazbeck
5. The Man in the Mirror: Reflections on Dementia Caregiving in Lebanon
Nayiri Baboudjian Bouchakjian
Part III: Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia
6. Truman in Beirut: Journeying Through Fear and Immobility
Pia Maria Bou Doleh
7. Drink the Sea: Twenty Years of Walking and Falling in Beirut
Jehan Bseiso
8. Ta(l)king Back (to) the City—Fragments of Beirut and/in Me
Farah Aridi
Part IV: The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma
9. Playing Tennis in Beirut: Sisterhood and Transnational Aches
Yasmine Shamma
10. Sickness of Separation: Reflections on Expatriation, Repatriation, and Motherhood
Nancy Falco Chedid
Part V: Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health
11. Scarred Skin and Wiggling Worms: What I Learned from my Eating Disorder
Jinane El Khoury
12. Illnesses of Illusion and Disillusionment: From Euphoria to Aporia
George Sadaka
Conclusion – Countering Self-Erasure: Lebano-Pathography and Future Studies in Auto/Biography
Sleiman El Hajj
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Podcast, Joel Stephen Birnie on “My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania”
‘In this podcast, Gabriella Kelly Davies highlights Joel Stephen Birnie’s conversation with her about ‘My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania’, his historical biography of Tarenootairer (c. 1806–1858), his earliest known ancestral grandmother, and her two surviving daughters, Mary Ann Arthur (c. 1821–1871) and Fanny Cochrane Smith (c. 1832–1905). These three extraordinary matriarchs fought for the Indigenous communities they founded in Tasmania, sparking a tradition of social justice that continues in Joel’s family today. https://www.biographersinconversation.com/s01e07-joel-stephen-birnie-my-peoples-songs/
Joel Birnie introduces us to Tarenootairer, Mary Ann and Fanny and reveals why he felt compelled to write My People’s Songs. He explains his goal in writing the book, why he chose to structure My People’s Songs around three self-contained biographies of Tarenootairer, Mary Ann and Fanny, and why he shares their stories from their perspective and in their voices. He discloses how Mary Ann’s fight for autonomy laid the foundation for contemporary Indigenous politics and how he chose to portray Mary Ann’s role as a voice of self-empowerment for Tasmania’s Indigenous people.
In My People’s Songs, Joel explores Fanny’s skilled and tenacious political advocacy and how her persistence resulted in her receiving a higher pension and an increased land grant despite intense opposition from Tasmanian politicians and some sections of the media. Fanny challenged the false declaration of Indigenous Tasmanian extinction; Joel shares with us its crucial impacts during her lifetime and today. Few archival records exist of Indigenous peoples’ lives in nineteenth-century Tasmania and those that are available lack an Indigenous perspective. They are also tainted by colonial half-truths, interpretations and propaganda. Joel describes his research strategy and how he overcame the many challenges involved in piecing together such fragmentary evidence that was biased by a colonial lens.
Tarenootairer (c.1806–58) was still a child when a band of white sealers bound her and forced her onto a boat. From there unfolded a life of immense cruelty inflicted by her colonial captors. As with so many Indigenous women of her time, even today the historical record of her life remains a scant thread embroidered with half-truths and pro-colonial propaganda.
But Joel Stephen Birnie grew up hearing the true stories about Tarenootairer, his earliest known ancestral grandmother, and he was keen to tell his family’s history without the colonial lens. Tarenootairer had a fierce determination to survive that had a profound effect on the course of Tasmanian history. Her daughters, Mary Ann Arthur and Fanny Cochrane Smith shared her activism: Mary Ann’s fight for autonomy influenced contemporary Indigenous politics, while Fanny famously challenged the false declaration of Indigenous Tasmanian extinction.
Together, these three extraordinary women fought for the Indigenous communities they founded and sparked a tradition of social justice that continues in Birnie’s family today.
From the early Bass Strait sealing industries to George Augustus Robinson’s ‘conciliation’ missions, to Aboriginal internment on Flinders Island and at Oyster Cove,
My People’s Songs is both a constellation of the damage wrought by colonisation and a testament to the power of family.
Revelatory, intimate and illuminating, it does more than assert these women’s place in our nation’s story – it restores to them a voice and a cultural context.
‘A tour de force.’
– Prof. Lyndall Ryan
Gabriella Marie Kelly-Davies
Doctoral candidate: Breaking through thepain barrier. The extraordinary life of Dr Michael J. Cousins
School of Literature, Arts and Media
University of Sydney
gkel6637@uni.sydney.edu.au
0408 256 381
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Three creative contributions and a review
I am delighted to announce that the Creative Matters section of volume 13 of the European Journal of Life Writing is now active. Three wonderful creative non-fiction pieces have been added:
– “Gone Missing” by James Woodall (a memoir describing the biography-making of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges)
– “Polyculed: A Writer’s Tale of Surviving the Pandemic and a Polycule” by Christopher Linforth (an essay exploring contemporary and historical polyamory and its relationship with identity-formation and artistic personae)
– “Portrait of my Father” by Nadia Butt (a work of life writing in which the author aims to piece together her late father)
Also online now is a review of Anita Wohlmann’s Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused by Anna Ovaska.
A new batch of regular articles is also expected soon.
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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New Book by a List Member–hello, world? by Anna Poletti
Some list members might be interested in list member Anna Poletti’s new novel which is a creative treatment of a number of the preoccupations in their scholarship on life writing. hello, world? explores the intersection of identity technologies, sexuality and gender, with a particular interest in how the mobile phone can be a medium for self-life-writing.
The novel is published by Semiotext(e) in the United States, and is also available as an audiobook (narrated by Anna) on various platforms.
https://www.semiotexte.com/hello-world
“hello, world? is a stunning achievement that tells an electrifying story about the enigma of desire and surrender. In riveting and dynamic prose, Poletti takes us on a journey through the bewildering dynamics of sexuality and otherness, showing us a whole new world that beckons us to say hello.”
—Dr. Gila Ashtor, Columbia University, author of Homo Psyche and Masochism: A Contemporary Introduction
“hello, world? starts with that all too familiar scenario of uprooting one’s life for a partner only to be let down by them. What Seasonal does then might also be familiar to many—they go on the apps, fuck around, find out. What they find are ways of engaging intimately with others that become experiments in the relation between the body and the body-politic under what we commonly call late capitalism and might wish to call late patriarchy. The violence of both call for forms of enactment, of selves in relation, that can provide some kind of figure for them, some way of figuring them out. The delight in this book is not just in how closely observed and felt these things are, but how closely thought as well.”
—McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl
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We are pleased to announce that the fourth batch of the current volume (13) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.
Added to the 2024 edition of our journal are the following three papers:
– “Living on a Picture: Approaching Images and Life Stories in Social Media” by Ana Isabel Galván García de las Bayonas.
– “A Feminist Autoethnography of a Family Archive: Affects, Narratives and Practices During Two World Crises: World War II and Covid-19” by Sonia Yuruen Lerma Mayer.
– “Writing the Lone Mother’s Lifetime: Peter Handberg’s Den vita fläcken” by Helena Wahlström Henriksson.
Also available now is a review of Amy Carlson’s Reading Mediated Life Narratives: Auto/Biographical Agency in the Book, Museum, Social Media, and Archives by Iana Nikitenko.
More publications will follow throughout the coming months.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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Nieuwsbrief Biografie Instituut November 2024–Rectification on behalf of the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Arts
Nieuwsbrief Biografie Instituut
November 2024
[English below]
Rectificatie namens het Faculteitsbestuur van de Faculteit der Letteren
Onlangs hebt u een e-mail ontvangen waarin werd medegedeeld dat het Biografie Instituut zou ophouden te bestaan. Wij willen u met deze rectificatie informeren dat deze informatie niet juist is. Het Biografie Instituut blijft actief en bestaat nog steeds. Tot zijn opvolging zullen de honneurs worden waargenomen door hon. prof.dr. Hans Renders.
Daarnaast willen we u geruststellen dat ook onze nieuwsbrief zal blijven bestaan. We waarderen uw interesse en betrokkenheid.
Contact met het instituut en aan- of afmelden voor de nieuwsbrief blijft mogelijk door te mailen naar biografie.instituut@rug.nl.
Bedankt voor uw begrip en steun.
Meer informatie kunt u vinden op de website www.biografieinstituut.nl
Voor aan‐ en afmelding van deze nieuwsbrief kunt u mailen naar biografie.instituut@rug.nl
Newsletter Biography Institute
November 2024
Rectification on behalf of the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Arts
You recently received an email stating that the Biography Institute would cease to exist. With this rectification, we would like to inform you that this information is incorrect. The Biography Institute remains active and still exists. Until a successor is appointed, the honours will be performed by honorary professor Hans Renders.
We would also like to reassure you that our newsletter will also continue to exist. We appreciate your interest and involvement.
Contact with the institute and subscribing or unsubscribing to the newsletter remains possible by sending an email to biografie.instituut@rug.nl.
Thank you for your understanding and support.
More information on www.biografieinstituut.nl
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‘The Life Story in Oral History Practice’: freely accessible online issue of Oral History journal out now
A new special online issue of the the leading journal Oral History, entitled ‘The Life Story in Practice’, presents for the first time a comprehensive volume of articles interrogating the life story methodology with numerous embedded links to audio files. This edition is an open-access (free to all). The life story in-depth biographical interview is central to the work of the British Library Oral History team encompassing National Life Stories (NLS www.bl.uk/nls); the oral history fieldwork charity established in 1987. NLS has supported this edition of the journal which stems from the papers and discussions at the NLS International Symposium on the Life Story, held at the British Library in summer 2023. .
We are confident it will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners, whether you are just setting out in oral history or have decades of experience. Download the pdf at https://www.ohs.org.uk/oral-history-online/.
The special issue addresses the topic of the life story from many angles, including:
-An exploration of the process of life story recording and how this contrasts with other oral history techniques
-The value of life story collections to to wider policy debates
-The specific challenges we face in archiving and providing public access to life story interviews
-Reviews of the life story in the context of oral history scholarship
The edition was edited by Mary Stewart (NLS Director) and Rob Perks (NLS Trustee and former Director), and the publication features contributions from many members of the National Life Stories team in conjunction with internationally acclaimed oral historians including Alex Freund, Indira Chowdhury, Doug Boyd, Don Ritchie and Alistair Thomson .
Read, listen, enjoy and feel free to contact the NLS and British Library oral history team with further questions and queries. For those interested in NLS’ ongoing projects our latest NLS Annual Review is available digitally at the British Library Research Repository [https://doi.org/10.23636/96rq-z652].
**If you’ll be attending the OHA Annual Meeting in Cincinnati this autumn then please join Doug Boyd, Rob Perks, Don Ritchie and Mary Stewart for a roundtable discursive session exploring themes from the special issue (currently programmed for 10am on Friday 1 November – but check the final programme when it’s live). **
Thanks to the journal article authors, the editors, designers and proof reader of Oral History, the Symposium attendees, the NLS team and Trustees and – of course – to all past and current interviewees.
Contact Information
Mary Stewart, Lead Curator Oral History & Director National Life Stories at the British Library
Contact Email
URL
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Cluster: Gender and (Auto)pathography from a Transnational Perspective
I am pleased to announce that we just published a cluster at the European Journal of Life Writing site: “Gender and (Auto)pathography from a Transnational Perspective”, edited by Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico.
The cluster, which with an introduction by Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico, makes a timely contribution to the medical humanities from a life writing perspective. Like all contributions to our journal, it is completely open access. It contains the following contributions:
– “The Violent ‘Trojan Horse’: a Comparative, Transnational Reading of Two Paralysis Narratives” by Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico.
– “A New ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: Physical Impairment and Hospital Confinement as Post-Holocaust Sequelae in Ilona Karmel’s Stephania” by Francisco José Cortés Vieco.
– “‘Women Bleed in Private’ / Miscarriage Goes Public: A Relational Response to Social Silence over Miscarriage in Sarah Ruhl’s Writings” by Noelia Hernando-Real
– “‘Unlearning this Desire to Vanish’: Rape, Illness, and the Politics of Testimony in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena and Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points” by Isabel Marqués-López
More articles in the general section of the journal, as well as reviews, are expected in October.
Kind regards,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Journal Manager
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Bloomsbury wants to publish a book of interviews with biofictionalists who write in a language other than English. If you know of such a prominent biofictionalist and you would like to interview that person, please consider contributing to this volume. If you have questions, please feel free to contact Michael Lackey at lacke010@morris.umn.edu. Michael would be happy to assist you through the whole process. If you plan to interview an author, please let Michael know as soon as possible, as Bloomsbury would like the names of potential interviewers and interviewees as it builds the webpage for the book.
Here is the CFI (Call for Interviews), which will give you a clear sense of the project.
Call For Interviews
World Biofictionalists in Translation: Literature as Existential Map
Bloomsbury’s Biofiction Studies series
Michael Lackey
There have been two volumes of interviews with prominent biofictionalists, and while they have proven to be immensely valuable to scholars, they are limited in that they focus primarily on writers from English-speaking countries. In short, there is a need for a volume of interviews with famous biofictionalists who write in a language other than English. To address this need, we are soliciting interviews with famous biofictionalists from 20 to 25 countries. Those interviews should be conducted in the author’s native language but then translated into English. The interviews should be between 5000 and 7500 words. They are due by August 15, 2025. All submissions should be sent to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu).
Criteria for Acceptance and Instructions
1) Biofiction Focus: Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a real person. Only interviews that are explicitly about biofiction will be considered.
2) Error Free: When interviewers and authors engage in a conversation, errors of all kinds inevitably occur. Interviews should be recorded and then transcribed. But after the work has been transcribed, the interviewer and the author should edit the work. Eliminating needless comments and errors is crucial.
3) Smooth Flowing: In addition to eliminating all kinds of errors, the work should be organized in such a way that it flows smoothly and has a maximum impact on readers. Here it is important to keep your audience in mind. All questions and answers should be comprehensible to everyday readers, so make sure that readers are given sufficient information to understand and appreciate the conversation.
4) Substantive Contribution: The interview needs to contain something that makes it a worthwhile contribution to biofiction studies. Therefore, the interviewer must have a commanding grasp of biofiction scholarship and be able to clarify how the interview contributes to the existing scholarship.
5) High-Profile Authors: We are specifically looking for prominent writers from countries where English is not the primary language. If the biofictionalist is unknown, the odds of acceptance will decline considerably.
My Role as Editor
I will be available to work with scholars throughout the whole process. If you would like help becoming conversant in biofiction scholarship or generating interview questions, please feel free to contact me. A team of biofiction scholars will help me determine which interviews to include. After the interviews are selected, I will work with the interviewers on editing them, which will consist mainly of correcting grammar, eliminating errors, cutting fluff, organizing the conversation, sharpening the focus, and polishing the English. I will also write the introduction to the volume.
My Method
To date, I have interviewed more than 30 biofictionalists. For your benefit, here is a description of my method. After reading all the author’s biofictions a couple times and doing research about the actual historical figures, I start composing a list of approximately ten questions. One week before the interview, I send the questions to the author. I give the author the freedom to reject or revise any question. I then meet the author in order to conduct a one-hour interview, which I record. Immediately after the interview, I send the recording to my research assistant, who transcribes it. It is best to have a full transcription within a couple weeks, so that the interview is still fresh in the minds of the interviewer and the author as the two edit the work. After receiving the transcription, I then edit the document by eliminating garbled sentences and incoherent thoughts, correcting errors of fact, polishing the language, and reorganizing the interview into a coherent narrative. Then I send it to the author, who is given carte blanche freedom to edit as he/she/they will. Sometimes there is only one exchange, and then the interview is ready to go. Other times there are multiple exchanges, which can last for a week or more. The most important thing is that the author has the freedom to express his/her/their ideas exactly as he/she/they wants. This is my method, and it has worked. But you might have a different or better method, so you should do what works best for you.
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Ryan Cropp Wins Australian PM Literary Award in History for Donald Horne Biography
A huge congratulations to Ryan Cropp for winning the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award in History for ‘Donald Horne. A Life in the Lucky Country’, his insightful and deeply nuanced biography of Donald Horne, a prominent and outspoken Australian journalist, writer, public intellectual and social critic. In July, Ryan chatted with Gabriella Kelly-Davies in a Biographers in Conversation episode about the choices he made while writing the book. [https://www.biographersinconversation.com/s01e16-ryan-cropp-donald-horne-a-life-in-the-lucky-country/]
Gabriella Marie Kelly-Davies
Doctoral candidate: Breaking through the pain barrier. The extraordinary life of Dr Michael J. Cousins
School of Literature, Arts and Media
University of Sydney
gkel6637@uni.sydney.edu.au
0408 256 381
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Aan de geabonneerden op de Nieuwsbrief van het Biografie Instituut
Afgelopen maand juni ontving u het Jaarverslag van het Biografie Instituut, met daarin ook een overzicht wat we de laatste twintig jaar tot stand hebben gebracht, zie jaarverslag 2023-2024 in het Nederlands
Deze laatste Nieuwsbrief is bedoeld om u mede te delen dat vanwege Europese wetgeving alle namen en adressen van de geabonneerden op onze mailinglist vanaf vandaag uit de bestanden gewist zullen worden, omdat het Biografie Instituut niet meer bestaat. Wie daar meer over wil weten zij verwezen naar enkele interviews die onlangs in de pers zijn verschenen, het eerste interview is ook in het Engels.
Interview Ukrant 19 juni 2024 (met reactie van de decaan)
Interview EW 27 juni 2024 Interview Renders
Trouw 29 juni 2024 Onzekere toekomst voor het Biografie Instituut
Argus 3 juli 2024 Biografie Instituut wordt de nek omgedraaid
Interview Dagblad van het Noorden 13 juli 2024
Een klein deel van het archief van het Biografie Instituut is digitaal te vinden onder Archief Biografie Instituut – Hans Renders Archive
Op deze site is ook te zien welke promovendi nog door prof. em. Hans Renders begeleid worden, zowel vanuit de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen als namens andere universiteiten.
Met vriendelijke groet,
Hans Renders (J.W.Renders@rug.nl)
David Veltman (D.Veltman@rug.nl)
To the recipients of the Newsletter of the Biography Institute
This last Newsletter is written to let you know that in accordance with European law, all names and addresses will be removed from our files as of today, because the Biography Institute no longer exists. For those wishing to know more, we refer to some interviews that appeared recently in the press, the first being also in English.
Interview Ukrant 19 June 2024 (with response by the dean)
Interview EW 27 June 2024 Interview Renders
Trouw 29 June 2024 Onzekere toekomst voor het Biografie Instituut
Argus 3 July 2024 Biografie Instituut wordt de nek omgedraaid
Interview Dagblad van het Noorden 13 July 2024
A small part of the archive of the Biography Institute can be found digitally under Archief Biografie Instituut – Hans Renders Archive
On this site, the PhD students are mentioned that are still under supervision of prof. em. Hans Renders, both within the University of Groningen and on behalf of other universities.
Kind regards,
Hans Renders (J.W.Renders@rug.nl)
David Veltman (D.Veltman@rug.nl)
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We are pleased to announce that the third batch of the current volume (13) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.
Added to the 2024 edition of our journal is “Manifestations of Phototext as Hybrid Narratives in Biographies of Ingeborg Bachmann and Sylvia Plath” by Sophie Mayr and “The Physiognomy of an Impossible Return: Relational Geometries Between Autobiography, Narration and Image in Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole” by Niccolò Amelii.
Also available now is a review of Lily Robert-Foley’s The Duty to Presence by Helena Wahlström Henriksson.
Please also be informed that the European Journal of Life Writing can now be followed LinkedIn!
There is also an upcoming cluster on medical humanities, so stay tuned!
On behalf of the editorial team,
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
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Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, volume 46, number 3, 2023
on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53164
—-
Editor’s Note
Open-Forum Articles
Memoir, Utopia, and Belonging in the Postcolony: Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone
Hedley Twidle
In Better to Have Gone (2021), the nonfiction writer Akash Kapur weaves together memoir and a history of Auroville, an intentional community or “living laboratory” in Tamil Nadu, southern India. My essay considers how this family biography grapples with what the historian Jessica Namakkal calls “the paradox of a postcolonial utopia,” as Kapur’s personal quest to understand the deaths of two founding members of Auroville widens into a reflection on twentieth-century utopianism and its discontents. At the heart of the work, I suggest, lies the challenge of a secular response to spiritually motivated lives: how can a biographer take seriously the experiences of those whose beliefs he does not share (or might find objectionable, even laughable)?
Disability as Intersectional Identity: Some Reflections on Indian Disabled Life Narratives
P. Boopathi
Despite being few in number, the life narratives of disabled people from India elucidate the ordeals faced by the disabled due to social indifference, traditional family values, ableism, lack of legal protection, and the shame and monstrosity associated with disability in India. This essay explores three disabled life narratives—Naseema, The Incredible Story (2005) by Naseema Hurzuk, The Other Senses (2012) by Preeti Monga, and Lights Out: A True Story of a Man’s Descent into Blindness (2014) by L. Subramani— to demonstrate how the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender constitutes the disabled subject in the Indian context, and how the authors surmount the social and attitudinal barriers posed by family and society to lead a dignified life. For all three writers, their caste and class offer leverage for coping with their acquired disability and for empowerment through economic and technological means. The issues of motherhood and gender, however, emerge as significant obstacles to their progress, and further worsen their social conditions.
The Me in the Poster: Mirrors, Photographs, and “Crip Double Consciousness” in Connie Panzarino’s Memoir
Craig Rustici
This essay elaborates the concept “crip double consciousness” to assess how Connie Panzarino’s experience as a poster child impacted her memoir The Me in the Mirror and her career as a disability activist. The memoir presents multiple mirror episodes that mark stages in Panzarino’s narrative of emancipation. It also recounts how Panzarino deploys photographs of herself, another source of reflected images, to press for access and necessary accommodations. Most significantly, an incident at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) telethon mirrors—that is, reflects with reversals—the moment that gives the memoir its title when a four-year-old Panzarino imagines that her mirror reflection is “another ‘Connie’” free of physical impairments. The conscious doubling of selves Panzarino experiences at the MDA telethon shapes how she reconstructs her earlier, foundational encounter with mirrored selves.
Dream House as Queer Testimony: Ephemera as Evidence in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House
Chloe R. Green
In this article, I examine how formal experimentation shapes the act of witnessing in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House. By analyzing Machado’s autobiographical depictions of queer domestic abuse, which are refracted through a panoply of genres and forms, I argue that her memoir challenges the belief that testimonial narrative must be formally conventional to be believed. I propose that Machado’s formal experimentation and generic instability encourage a mode of reading that is embodied, affective, and crucially queer as a way to address the structural inequities that govern whose testimonies are believed and why. As In the Dream House queers the testimonial form, both in its privileging of ephemeral evidence and its interpolation of the reader’s agency, I argue that it creates a literary metric through which queer subjects can create their own modes of justice.
Brother Outsider: Memoir and the Strategies of the Awkward Black
Tyrone R. Simpson II
Using cultural theory, particularly theories of affect, this essay analyzes Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir A Beautiful Struggle (2009) to highlight awkwardness as a trope that recent Black autobiographers deploy to underscore their racial interstitiality and to negotiate their fluctuating identification with blackness—a racial condition that by dint of Civil Rights reform entails both social privileges and persecutions. I show that the use of this trope seeks to produce a new racial category altogether.
Recovering Memories of Holocaust Displacement and Survival in Contemporary (Auto)biographical Comics: On the Collaborative Volume But I Live
Dana Mihăilescu
The comics medium is recognized today as a highly effective way to represent Holocaust experience and memory, and their challenges for new generations, as established in important studies by Hillary Chute, Victoria Aarons, Ole Frahm et al., and Matt Reingold. Continuing in these scholars’ footsteps, I will explore a new direction of Holocaust representation in (auto)biographical graphic narratives over the past few years: that of addressing not just the traumatic aspects of the Holocaust but also the importance of acts of solidarity as resistance during and after World War II in ensuring survival and (self-)care. I will assess this aspect of representation in But I Live, a volume edited by Charlotte Schallié comprising three graphic narratives of child survivors from Romania and the Netherlands, the products of collaboration with well-known graphic artists from North America (Miriam Libicki), Israel (Gilad Seliktar), and Germany (Barbara Yelin)
Collective Biography and Micro-periodization: A Data-Rich Analysis of Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901)
Helen Kingstone
Collective biography contributes to processes of periodization. The article examines how Victorians periodized their own era, through a corpus linguistic analysis of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901). This apparently monumental British imperial project was disproportionately populated by very recent lives, which threatened the demarcation of past from present. Corpus stylistic analysis is used to identify trends among the 8,000 DNB entries on people who had died since 1850, and concepts from memory studies show how DNB contributors transitioned those lives from informal “communicative” memory into monumental “cultural” memory. Contributors sometimes presented themselves as contemporaries of the recent lives they represented, and sometimes as generationally distinct. The article focuses on four evaluative terms they deployed: “modern,” “will always,” “permanent value,” and “generation,” which contributors used as a form of micro-periodization to demarcate their subjects’ achievements and values from their own. “Micro-periodization” may artificially enable biographers to claim the measure of hindsight necessary to narrate recent lives.
Reviews
The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada, by Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill, Julie Rak, and Candida Rifkind
Reviewed by Manuela Costantino
Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, edited by James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen
Reviewed by Julia Novak
As Told by Herself: Women’s Childhood Autobiography, 1845–1969, by Lorna Martens
Reviewed by Emma Maguire
Women’s Life Writing in Post-Communist Romania: Reclaiming Privacy and Agency, by Simona Mitroiu
Reviewed by Oana Popescu-Sandu
Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology, edited by Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman
Reviewed by Elizabeth Colwill
Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging, by Nicole Stamant
Reviewed by Francesca T. Royster
Black Travel Writing: Contemporary Narratives of Travel to Africa by African American and Black British Authors, by Isabel Kalous
Reviewed by Erica L. Williams
Building that Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans, by Samira Saramo
Reviewed by Sara Maaria Saastamoinen
Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives, edited by Eleanor Ty
Reviewed by Calvin McMillin
Graphic Public Health: A Comics Anthology and Road Map, by Meredith Li-Vollmer
Reviewed by JoAnn Purcell
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BROWN BAG BIOGRAPHY
DISCUSSIONS OF LIFE WRITING BY & FOR TOWN & GOWN
THURSDAYS, 12:00 NOON–1:15 PM HST, unless otherwise noted
KUYKENDALL 410 (UH MĀNOA)
All are welcome to attend. For more information, please visit the Center for Biographical Research’s website https://manoa.hawaii.edu/cbr/, contact us at 808-956-3774 or gabiog@hawaii.edu, or sign up for our mailing list at https://forms.gle/Sr9WdvNBD9WdwG7EA.
Fall 2024 SCHEDULE
September 12: “Clairboyance: A Reading & Craft Chat”
Kristiana Kahakauwila, Director of the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
NB: Time: 3:00 to 4:30 pm HST
September 19: “Puana: A Conversation about the Upcoming Hawaiian-language Play Exploring Music, Kūpuna, and Their Living Legacy”
Moderated by Tammy Haili‘ōpua Baker, Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Featuring panelists Maile Speetjens, Kaʻiukapu Baker, Noelani Montas, Chris Patrinos, Antonio Hernandez, and Kelli Finnegan
Will be live streamed
September 26: “This Story is No Longer Available: Working with Experiential Media and Life Narratives”
Amy Carlson, Serials Librarian, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library
October 3: “Lose your Father(land): A former slave turned Calvinist missionary returns to Elmina, Ghana (1742–47)”
Peter Arnade, Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts, Languages & Letters, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
October 10: “Ahu‘ena: A Life In and Beyond the Archives”
Noah Hanohano Dolim, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
October 17 “Imua Me Ka Hopo Ole – Kānaka ‘Ōiwi Survivance and Colonial Education in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1900–1941”
Derek Taira, PhD, Historian of Education and 20th Century Hawai‘i and US, Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Affiliate Faculty, Center for Pacific Island Studies and Indigenous Politics Program, Department of Political Science
October 24: “Imagining Life in Honolulu Chinatown circa 1900”
Wing Tek Lum, Honolulu Businessman and Poet
October 31: “The Afterlives of Benjamin Lay, in Biography, Play, Graphic Novel, Children’s Book, and Documentary Film”
Marcus Rediker, Dai Ho Chun Chair in the College of Arts, Languages, & Letters, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
November 7: “[…]: Poems”
Fady Joudah, Poet, Physician, and Translator
NB: Time: 3:00 to 4:30pm HST
November 14: “John Kneubuhl: A Portal to Oceanic Modernism”
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Writer
Jackie Pualani Johnson, Professor Emerita, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo
November 21: “The Place of Jewish Voice for Peace in Hawaiʻi: An Intergenerational Roundtable”
Moderated by Cynthia G. Franklin, Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Featuring panelists Imani Altemus-Williams, Josie Brody, Beverly Davis, Rose Elovitz, George Hudes, and Julie Warech
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Sidonie Smith
Julia Watson
Reading Autobiography Now:
An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
3rd edition (2024, 430 pp.)
Table of Contents
Part I: Theorizing Life Narrative
Chapter 1: Defining and Discerning Life Narrative Forms
The Terms of Life Narrative
Life Narrative and History
Life Narrative and Biography
Life Narrative and the Novel
Life Narrative and Autotheory
Life Narrative and Autoethnography
Life Narrative and Autofiction
Chapter 2: Autobiographical Subjects
Memory
Sensory memory
Memory and history
The contextual politics of remembering
Collective remembering
Memory and trauma
Reading for memory
Relationality
Relationality and linguistic and rhetorical address
Relationality and psychodynamic processes
Relationality and difference
Relationality and subjectivation
Relationality, vulnerability, and ethical response
Relationality as assemblage
Reading for relationality
Experience
Experience as constitutive of the subject
Experience as discursive
Experience as interpretation
Experience and authority
Reading for the authority of experience
Identity
Identity as difference and commonality
Identity, positionality, and performativity
Identity as historically-specific models
Identities as intersectional
Identity, “doing,” and assemblage theory
Identity and virtuality
Reading for identity
Spatiality
Space as material surround or place
Spaces of sociality
Geopolitical space and spatial rhetorics
Spatial tropes and topoi of interiority
Reading for space
Embodiment
The visible body
Embodied memory
Embodiment, trauma, somatic practices
Embodiment and affect
Embodiment, sexuality, and desire
Embodiment and able-bodiedness
Embodiment and the autobiography of things
Embodiment as assemblage
Embodiment and quantification
Reading for embodiment
Agency
Agency, ideology, and power
Agency, tactics, and strategies
Agency and disidentification
Agency and social practices
The distribution of agency
Reading for the politics of agency
Chapter 3: Autobiographical Acts
Coaxers, Coaches, and Coercers
Sites of Storytelling
Autobiographical “I”s: historical, narrative, narrated, ideological
The “real” or historical “I”
The narrating “I”
The narrated “I”
Complicating the narrating “I”-narrated “I” distinction
The ideological “I”
Reading the “I”
“I” Variations: graphic, witness, online, and quantified “I”s
The “I”s of autographics
The witnessing “I”
Online “I”s
The quantified “I”
Voice in Autobiographical Narration and Presentation
Relationality and the Others of Autobiographical Subjects
Addressees
Structuring Modes of Self-inquiry
Patterns of Emplotment
Media and Automediality
Archives
Consumers/Audiences
Paratextual Apparatuses
Chapter 4: What about Autobiographical Truth?
Part II: A Guide to Reading Life Narrative
Chapter 5: Reading Life Narratives: A Tool Kit of Strategies
Agency
Archives
Audience and addressees
Authenticity
Authority
Autobiographical “I”s
Automediality
Body and embodiment
Coaxers, coaches, and coercers
Coherence and closure
Collaborative life narrative
Collective autobiographical projects
Ethics
Evidence
Experience
Graphic “I”s
History and authorship
History of reading publics
Identity
Memory
Online self-presentation
Paratexts
Patterns of emplotment
Relationality
Self-knowledge and modes of inquiry
Sites of storytelling
Space and place
Temporality
Trauma and scriptotherapy
Voice
Chapter 6: Kinds of Life Narratives: A Compendium of Key Concepts and Genres
Academic memoir
Addiction narrative
Adoption narrative
Aging and life cycle narrative
Apology
Autie-biography
Autobiography in the second person
Autobiography in the third person
Autobiography, variants
Autographics
Autohagiography
Autothanatography
Autotopography
Bildungsroman, autobiographical
Biomythography
Breakdown and breakthrough narrative
Captivity narrative
Case study
Celebrity life narrative
Collaborative and collective life writing
Coming-of-age life narrative (sometimes called autobiographical bildungsroman)
Confession
Conversion narrative
Diary
Disability, illness, and diversely-embodied narratives
Ecobiography, ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene
Ethnic and postethnic life narrative
Family narratives: genealogical, filial, and generational
Filmic and video autobiographical works
Food memoir (gastrography)
Geographies of life narrative
Graphic memoir (autographics)
Grief narrative
Human rights narrative
Indigenous life narrative
Interview
Journal
Künstlerroman
Letters
Manifesto
Meditation
Memoir
Migrant and refugee life narrative
Nobody memoir
Oral history
Otobiography
Performance and theater as autobiographical
Personal essay
Photo-memoir and photography in life narrative
Poetic autobiography
Political life narrative
Prison narrative
Prosopography
Scriptotherapy
Self-help narrative
Self-portrait (in French, autoportrait)
Serial life narrative
Sex and gender narrative
“Slave” narrative
Spiritual life narrative
Testimonio
Trauma narrative
Travel narrative
War memoir
Witnessing, acts of
Acknowledgments
Bibliography: Life narratives and secondary works
Index
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The latest from Biographers in Conversation! Christie Lowrance about Thornton W. Burgess
Biographer Gabriella Kelly-Davies chats with biographers across the world about the multiplicity of choices they make while researching, writing and publishing life stories.
In each episode she explores elements of narrative strategy such as structure, use of fiction techniques, facts and truth, beginnings and endings and to what extent the writer interpreted the evidence rather than providing clues and leaving it to readers to do the interpreting themselves.
She also asks writers how they researched their books; how they balanced a subject’s public, personal and inner lives; and ethical issues such as privacy and revealing secrets.
Here’s the promo for the completed Season One:
Season One includes 24 conversations with prominent biographers across the globe on topics ranging from the lives of various writers, musicians and artists to Indigenous people and decolonisation, sleep science, the Irish Egan Harp, Roget’s Thesaurus, abortion rights, the use of microwave technology and nuclear bomb in World War II, the discovery of penicillin, and environmental conservation. Season One’s 24 episodes are available at www.biographersinconversation.com
And here’s the promo for this week’s episode:
In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Christie Lowrance chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while writing Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess, the children’s author and naturalist. Christie’s book is the first complete biography of the preeminent twentieth-century naturalist, wildlife advocate, children’s author and pioneer in environmental education and radio programming, credited by many with laying a foundation for the twentieth-century’s Nature Movement. https://www.biographersinconversation.com/s01e21-christie-lowrance-natures-ambassador/
Christie Lowrance shares her inspiration for writing Nature’s Ambassador and why she lives in the house in which Thornton Burgess was born. Nature’s Ambassador includes a trove of primary source material, with extensive quotations from Thornton’s correspondence, journals and interviews with a multiplicity of people. Christie describes how she conducted this research and how she narrowed the biographical scope to prevent writing a tome. She also shares her strategy for balancing Thornton’s professional, personal and inner lives and the literary devices she employed to create a captivating narrative.
Christie closes our conversation by describing her recently published book The Last Heath Hen: An Extinction Story. It is a true account of the dwindling days of a species of wild bird on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and the efforts to save it. She wrote it for young readers to show them the complexity of conservation and the importance of valuing all wildlife.
“Ms. Lowrance has captured the generous spirit, curious mind and loving heart of a children’s author whose simple message of respect and concern for wildlife reached across the country and over the seas. I can speak of the years of research, countless interviews and editing struggles this author went through to be absolutely certain she was capturing the character of the man and his impact on not only children’s literature but on the history of wildlife conservation and habitat preservation in our country.
Much of this he accomplished by engaging children through rooted-in-fact, well-crafted fictional literature. It is time to recognize this man who left us such an amazing legacy. Ken Burns, here is inspiration for a new project!”
MARY BEERS,
Education Director
Thornton W. Burgess Society
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AvtobiografiЯ: Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture—the latest issue is out.
The new issue of our journal is out https://avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija ! It features the first part of a special section on Russian Autobiographical Writing in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries edited by Marina Balina, Claudia Criveller and Andrea Gullotta with articles by Leona Toker, Maria Mayofis and Irina Savkina, plus articles in the general section by Andrey Fedotov&Pavel Uspenskij, Marco Caratozzolo&Ludmila Sproģe, Ben Musachio and Ilya Vinitsky. It also hosts an interview to Slava Sergeev by Francesca Lazzarin and book reviews by Iaroslav Golubinov, Giorgia Rimondi and Attilio Russo. The 2024 issue will feature the second part of the special section on Russian Autobiographical Writing in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.
Enjoy your summer reading!
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100054517927392
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MANAGING EDITOR POSITION, CENTER FOR BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA (7/15/2024)
Description
Title: Editor
Position Number: 0080851
Hiring Unit: C OF ARTS, LANGUAGES & LETTERS, CTR FOR BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH,
Location: UH at Manoa
Date Posted: 06/21/2024
Closing Date: 07/15/2024
Band: B
Salary: salary schedules and placement information
Full Time/Part Time: Full-time
Month: 11-month
Temporary/Permanent: Permanent
Duties and Responsibilities:
- *Serve as managing editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly;
- *Support activities of journal coeditors, staff, University of Hawai‘i Press (UH Press) personnel, and contributors, and vendors relating to journal organization, format, content, scheduling, development, production, and distribution, including but not limited to the following activities: reception, distribution, evaluation, tracking, and disposition of submissions for double-anonymous peer review; obtaining books for review, and working with the reviews editor on finding reviewers;
- *Copyedit or coordinate the copyediting of all journal content; preparing copyedited content for author review and approval; creating journal content as needed, including tables of contents and the annual bibliography;
- *Obtain, prepare, and create graphics material for use in the journal; design and typesetting for the journal in InDesign; prepare journal page proofs for author review; proofread the journal; make any necessary corrections to proofs in InDesign;
- *Ensure all permissions and rights are cleared for any journal content; obtain signed consent forms from all authors; advise authors on permissions process; facilitate the payment of any permissions fees; and ensure that all permissions agreements and any associated acknowledgments are finalized before transmittal;
- *Prepare the journal for transmittal to the UH Press; facilitate the distribution of complimentary copies; develop and maintain journal style guide; prepare annual budgets in conjunction with coeditors and UH Press personnel;
- *Fulfill journal fiscal requirements and maintain records in keeping with university and state practices, policies, and laws; process reprint requests and exchanges with other publishers; other duties as assigned by coeditors.
- *Manage Biography Monograph series.
- *Support activities of director, staff, UH Press personnel, and authors, and vendors relating to the Monograph series, performing comparable editorial functions as for the journal.
- *Manage Center facilities, programs, and activities, including but not limited to fulfilling Center fiscal requirements and maintaining records in keeping with university and state practices, policies, and laws;
- *Fulfill Center personnel requirements as needed, including supervising the work of student assistants, volunteers, or staff as needed; coordinating office assignments and university access for Visiting Scholars and Students;
- *Coordinate lecturers, conferences, and workshops, including Biography workshops for special issues; make arrangements for travel, lodging, food, and reimbursements; and coordinate programming and other logistics with guest coeditors and contributors traveling nationally or internationally to attend the workshop; prepare print, digital, and audiovisual materials for these events, which requires working after normal business hours including weekends and/or holidays;
- Oversee the Center’s website and social media; making any necessary updates and coordination with Center staff to maintain content and publicize all publications and activities of the Center;
- *Organize, administer, and publicize Center activities, such as the Biography Prize and Brown Bag Biography lecture series; maintain archive of Brown Bag series; support the preparation of Center proposals, and administration of grants, awards, and donations;
- *Schedule, monitor the use, and oversee the acquisition and maintenance of Center facilities, equipment, and supplies; serve as the Center contact and information source for students, faculty, and general public;
- Attend national and international academic conferences, as necessary.
- Other duties as assigned.
*Denotes essential functions
Minimum Qualifications
- Possession of a baccalaureate degree in Liberal Arts or related field and 3 year(s) of progressively responsible professional experience with responsibilities for a scholarly journal or in publishing; or any equivalent combination of education and/or professional work experience which provides the required education, knowledge, skills and abilities as indicated.
- Considerable working knowledge of principles, practices, and techniques in the area of publishing as demonstrated by broad knowledge of the full range of pertinent standard and evolving concepts, principles, and methodologies.
- Considerable working knowledge and understanding of applicable federal and state laws, rules, regulations, and theories and systems associated with publishing.
- Demonstrated ability to resolve wide ranging complex problems through the use of creative reasoning and logic to accurately determine the cause of the problems and the resolution of the problems in an effective, innovative, and timely manner.
- Demonstrated ability to interpret and present information and ideas clearly and accurately in writing, verbally, and by preparation of reports and other materials.
- Demonstrated ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with internal and external organizations, groups, team leaders and members, and individuals.
- Demonstrated ability to operate a personal computer and apply word processing software, and desktop publishing software such as InDesign.
- If applicable, for supervisory work, demonstrated ability to lead subordinates, manage work priorities and projects, and manage employee relations.
- Demonstrated project management skills, including the ability to manage multiple publishing projects and budgets.
- Ability to work with minimal supervision and to exercise independent professional judgment.
- Ability to supervise and coordinate the work of others.
- Ability to work during evenings, weekends, and/or holidays.
- Ability to travel to national and international locations in a timely manner.
Desirable Qualifications
- Possession of a graduate degree in a related field.
- Subject area knowledge pertinent to life writing.
- Editorial experience at a university press or similar organization.
- Experience with developmental editing, copyediting, production editing, proofreading, and/or typesetting.
- Demonstrated commitment to continuous learning.
- Ability to keep abreast of new technology in the field.
- Ability to create and prepare images for print, display, and electronic distribution with consideration for permissions, fair use, and other legal issues.
- Ability to engage in digital publishing and to develop and maintain social media and WordPress website.
- Familiarity with Adobe Acrobat, and Photoshop.
- Proficiency with appropriate style guides, such as the MLA Handbook (9th edition) and Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition).
- Knowledge of applicable federal and state laws, rules, and regulations associated with publishing scholarly journals or other academic publishing; familiarity with copyright issues and rights and permissions processes in publishing.
To Apply:
Click on the “Apply” button on the top right corner of the screen to complete an application and upload required documents. Submit (1) cover letter indicating how you satisfy the minimum and desirable qualifications; (2) resume; (3) the names and contact information of at least three professional references; and (4) transcripts showing degree and coursework to date appropriate to the position (original official transcripts will be required at the time of hire.)
Note: If you have not applied for a position before using NeoGov, you will need to create an account.
For inquiries please contact Craig Howes at craighow@hawaii.edu.
Apply here: https://www.schooljobs.com/careers/hawaiiedu/jobs/4554040/editor-pos-80851
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Comrades, I am thrilled to announce the release of a special issue about African American biofiction in the journal African American Review. This issue contains interviews with Claudia Rankine, Charles Johnson, Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Louis Edwards, as well as articles by Laura Cernat, Melissa Jenkins, and Julie Husband. It also contains the first brief history of African American biofiction. Obviously, a more comprehensive and authoritative history is waiting to be written.
Here is the link to the issue: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52799
If you do not have access to the special issue, contact me, and I will send you pdfs.
Here are the contents:
African American Biofiction
Michael Lackey: African American Biofiction: Introduction
Interviews
The Dynamics of Social Injustice in Biofiction: A Conversation with Claudia Rankine
The Primacy of Perception in Biofiction: A Conversation with Charles Johnson
The Power of Biofiction’s Poetic Imagination: A Conversation with Louis Edwards
Coalition Building through Biofiction: A Conversation with Jewell Parker Rhodes
Essays
Melissa Jenkins: Louis Edwards’ Oscar Wilde Discovers America: Gender, Race, and the Judas Kiss
Julie Husband: The Douglass Effect in Biofiction: The Case of Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic
Laura Cernat: “The tangled skein of connections”: Slavery Escape Routes From Individuality to Intersectionality in Biofiction and Speculative Historical Fiction–
Michael Lackey (he, his, him)
https://umn-morris.academia.edu/MichaelLackey
Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Distinguished University Teaching Professor
University of Minnesota, Morris
104 Humanities Building
600 East 4th Street
Morris, MN 56267-2132
320-589-6263
*
Long in the making and with sustained support from members of this list, Jay Prosser’s family memoir, Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns, has now been published in the UK with Black Spring Press. US distribution is scheduled for the fall but the book is available from Blackwell’s UK with no shipping costs to the US.
Synopsis
A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities. Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.
Praise for Loving Strangers
‘A beautiful and moving story that brings to life a fascinating part of Jewish history.’
Claudia Roden, CBE, Egyptian-born British writer and cultural anthropologist
‘With his latest book, Loving Strangers, Jay Prosser brings a fascinating new geography to the maps of Jewish roots memoirs. This odyssey to reclaim his Jewish identity through the memorabilia of his mother’s complex family history is both moving and compelling. A shimmering memoir of love’s work, healing for our fractured times.’
Nancy K. Miller, Author of What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past
‘Jay’s story is rich and fascinating. Through the prism of a family memoir, he shines a light on interracial marriage and its legacy, stories that have been previously taboo. He’s written a beautiful book that will resonate with anyone who is interested in under-represented cultures, and he is bold enough to rewrite history as we know it.’
Lily Dunn, Author of Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling, co-founder London Lit Lab
‘What is most moving in this gripping family memoir and diasporic Asian-European history is the account of how three generations in Jay Prosser’s family actively choose Jewishness. Love and historical circumstances create a hybrid, affiliative form of Jewishness that remains strange and contingent, yet also affirming in a sense of belonging that is neither territorial nor identitarian.’
Marianne Hirsch, Author of The Generation of Postmemory: Narrative and Visual Culture After the Holocaust
Jay Prosser
How I embraced my identity as a mixed-race, British-Asian Jew: new book previewed in the Jewish Chronicle
Loving Strangers is now out! https://blackspringpressgroup.com/products/loving-strangers
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Decolonizing the Self: How Do We Perceive Others When We Practice Autotheory?
The February Journal
Issue 03
Editorial. Two Dialogues on Self-Decolonization Shura Dogadaeva, Andrei Zavadski
This issue is dedicated to self-decolonizing practices exercised through the prism of autotheory. Employing different genres and stemming from different geographical, epistemological, and other contexts, the volume’s contributions variously analyze ways in which personal experience and positioning, indigenous knowledges, and doing away with formal rigidity as well as utilizing media other than writing (dance, sound, and others) are important for self-decolonization.
Suppose We See Ourselves Libby King
This autotheory essay considers the interplay between colonialism and invisibility, and explores how narrative form can act as a cultural intervention. The essay suggests that autoforms—such as autotheory, fictocriticism, autofiction, and autoethnography—expose invisible cultural rules and intrinsically alter the way content is understood. It is especially concerned with how colonialism uses authorship to limit internal observation and critique and suggests that by refiguring the ‘I’ and the ‘we,’ autoforms expose these invisible internal rules.
Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’ Melanie Garland
The two parts of this contribution—poetic sonority and essay—are poetic and theoretical experiments in response to the challenge of decolonizing the self. In particular, the author is interested in contrasting and intersecting past-present histories of the European diaspora in the global ‘South,’ drawing on her own family history marked by mestizaje and hybridity.
Montage of Freedom. Phonesia: The Art of Logo-Somatic Articulation through Encounter with Other Livings Anatoli Vlassov
This article delves into the concept of logo-somatic freedom through an analysis of three artworks: Chairs Mots, Diaphoner, and #DanseAvecLesMots. These works exemplify how encounters with ‘other livings’—including language, dance, and digital technology—foster and enrich logo-somatic freedom, transcending conventional boundaries between language, body, artist, audience, and technology.
Autoethnographic Reflections on One’s Own Imperialism Sofia Gavrilova
The essay mixes the genre of autoethnographic reflections with an attempt to conceptualize the challenge that members of the Russian academic community in exile are facing on both individual and collective levels. It frames the questions of responsibility, guilt, and identity transformation, and traces the evolution of my personal responses to them as an attempt to document and conceptualize the unavoidable shift in the research field, agenda, positionality, and methods that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought to Slavic/area studies.
Russian Colonial Sickness and Decolonial Recovery: Revelations of Autotheoretical Practice Nicola Kozicharow
This autotheoretical essay explores self-decolonization as a personal, embodied process through the author’s experience of displacement and chronic illness. Russia’s full-scale invasion of and ongoing genocide in Ukraine have drawn the world’s attention to the brutal history of Russian colonialism. The fact the author was largely unfamiliar with this history blew a hole in the foundation of her scholarly expertise and sense of self.
An Act of Love: Three Experiences of Self-Decolonization in the Academic Community of the United Kingdom Keren Poliah, Vashti Suwa Gbolagun, John Yuen, Ka Keung, Hannah Helm, David Junior Gilbert
This narrative essay presents testimonies that uncover the fragmented identity of members of minoritized ethnic groups in the academic context of the United Kingdom. It discusses outcomes of a project which, as part of an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) scholarship from the Doctoral School of the University of Salford, gathered testimonies and stories of international postgraduate doctoral researchers highlighting that the process of decolonization should start from within.
‘Dotokpo’ and Soak Up the Ancestral Logic in the Ghanaian Spoken-word Poet Yom Nfojoh’s Record Alter Native Sela Kodjo Adjei
This critical essay offers deep insights into the Ghanaian performance-poet and writer Yom Nfojoh’s EP Alter Native. By means of textual analysis and a systematic reading of Yom’s spoken word poems, the author deconstructs key verses and stanzas in his poems to reveal decolonial praxis, self-disclosure, and coded messages. Broadening the discussion, this essay incorporates the author’s personal perspectives as an artist who likewise pursues decolonial aesthetics by highlighting his engagement with Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe Vodu art in relation to his artistic research and practice.
Facing Racism, Leaving Multiculturalism: Afro-Colombian, Black, Palenquero, and Raizal People’s (In)visibilities in Colombian Museums Sofia Natalia Gonzalez Ayala
This imaginary guided tour gathers chronologically some of the ways Black, Afro-Colombian, Palenquero, and Raizal communities or people in Colombia have appeared represented—visible and invisible—in Colombian museums between 1994 and 2023. The author reflects on exhibitions (one of which she participated in), artworks, and books to show how a multicultural vision of the nation in museums has helped maintain a neutral memory that hides the dire consequences of the transatlantic slave trade among Afro-descendants.
Book review. Von Oswald M (2022) Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin Isabel Bredenbröker
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Approaches to Teaching Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Edited by Lynn Domina
MLA, 2024
One of the most commonly taught slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is rightly celebrated for its progressive and distinctive appeals to dismantle the dehumanizing system of American slavery. Depicting the abuse Jacobs experienced, her years in hiding, and her escape to the North, the work evokes sympathy for Jacobs as a woman and a mother. Today, it continues to inform readers about gender and sexuality, power and justice, and Black identity in the United States.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” discusses different editions of the work and suggests background readings. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” explore Jacobs’s literary techniques and influences, drawing on autobiography theory, medical humanities, and theology, among other perspectives. Contributors also propose pairings with historical and recent literary works as well as teaching approaches involving visual arts, geography, archives, digital humanities, and service learning.
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Two new articles now online at the European Journal of Life Writing
We are pleased to announce that the second batch of articles for the current volume (13) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online. Added to the 2024 edition of our journal are the papers “‘I shudder that I exist’. Hadewijch’s Mystical Writings as a Wayward Precursor of Autotheoretical Life-Writing” by Kris Pint, and “The Visual Life Story of a Self-made Economic Man: The Painting Series of Willem Albert Scholten (1819-1892) as an Autobiographical Practice” by Marieke Dwarswaard.
Please also be informed that the European Journal of Life Writing can now be followed LinkedIn!
Visit our website to read the full announcement.
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu
Craig Howes, List Manager
Send notices for posting to craighow@hawaii.edu
To browse current listings and the IABA-L archive, go to
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/cbr/iaba-listserv/
TO SUBSCRIBE
https://hawaii.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=4b810d876f2fee4b91c849f87&id=5ed81693cc
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https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
IABA Student and New Scholar Network (SNS)
https://iabasns.wordpress.com; on Facebook: facebook.com/IABASNS
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Biography 46: 2 Now available
on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52584
Editor’s Note
Open-Forum Articles
Exvangelical (De)conversion Narratives and the Religious Politics of Spiritual Autobiography
Matthew Mullins
Scholars and pundits have devoted significant attention to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States in recent years. Within that demographic there are many former evangelical Christians who remain Christian but are no longer evangelical or have abandoned Christianity altogether. Many of these former evangelical Christians identify as exvangelicals. This essay analyzes autobiographies written by exvangelicals, and argues that their narratives of deconversion can best be understood in the generic tradition of the conversion narrative. When situated in this generic context, these exvangelical autobiographies testify to a crisis in twenty-first-century religious politics that mirrors similar tensions in the past and suggests the US is in a period of civic transition.
Psychoanalytic Readings of the Soul: The Birth of Psychography and the New Strategies of Psycholiterary Portraiture
Agnieszka Sobolewska
As a simultaneously psychoanalytic, literary, and lifewriting genre, psychography has not yet been the subject of any systematic reflection. As a genre that sprouted out of nineteenth-century pathography, psychography prepared the ground for the development of innovative strategies for writing lives. The author introduces a genealogy of this hybrid writing genre that found itself at the core of early psychoanalytic literature, and points to its interconnections with life writing and literary modernism.
“With Its Shadows Dominating the Brightness”: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and the Subjects of AIDS History
Jacob E. Aplaca
This essay reads Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother (1997), a memoir that recounts her brother Devon’s AIDS-related death, in relation to both the corpus of US AIDS life writing that emerged during the so-called height of the AIDS crisis and today’s ongoing practices of AIDS commemoration. Challenging the activist-centered knowledge paradigms through which the subjects of AIDS memoir largely continue to be understood, My Brother lays bare the conditions that sustain the celebratory legacy of US AIDS activism and its exemplary gay white male subject—an understanding of AIDS that brackets off what Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani have described as the uneven distribution of AIDS crises across the world. At the same time, this essay considers the risks that attend contemporary efforts to bring into greater relief these global crises by assuming the transparency of Devon, and those similarly situated, as objects of our knowledge.
Between Genre and Medium: Hilda Tablet, Henry Reed’s Fictional Metabiography for Radio
Birgit Van Puymbroeck
In the 1950s, Henry Reed wrote the seven-part series Hilda Tablet, a humorous radio play for the Third Programme, the BBC’s cultural channel. The series deals with the fictional biographer Herbert Reeve—Henry Reed’s alter ego—who writes a biography of the also fictional author Richard Shewin and later the composer Hilda Tablet. This article analyzes Hilda Tablet in the light of biography studies. It argues that the series “remediates” the genre of biography on radio, and uses techniques associated with fictional metabiography and mockbiography to highlight, question, and satirize genre and media conventions. Through a contextual and audionarratological analysis, it recovers Hilda Tablet for critical analysis, and reflects on the use of audio techniques for biographical construction and interpretation. It contributes to the study of biography in two ways: by focusing on the little-explored hybrid genre of the radio biography, and by paying close attention to aspects of the fictional metabiography and mockbiography.
“Beyond the Front, Specificity Is Abandoned”: Illustrating Backgrounds in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Olivia Abram
This essay examines setting and its illustration in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic as autobiographically representative of its author. This approach inverts the conventional prioritization of subject and foreground as illustrative of the author/self, and instead focuses on the surroundings in which (and on which) they draw themselves.
The Testimonial Imperative, Collective Autobiography, and Individual Stories of #MeToo on Twitter
Leah Anderst
This essay looks closely at testimonials posted to Twitter as part of the viral #MeToo movement in October 2017. It examines a testimonial imperative at work in the movement, a driving need and a feeling of responsibility for survivors to come forward and join others who are speaking to share, to bear witness, and to listen to each other. The #MeToo movement has been described as a collective autobiography, but what we also see when we read #MeToo testimonial tweets is that many survivors posted, replied, and quote-tweeted in ways that highlight their individual experiences and their individual selves. By reading closely a number of tweets, this essay unearths important themes, strategies, and forged connections that emerged within this online autobiographical movement.
Biobibliographical Studies of Georgian Writers
Maia Ninidze, Saba Metreveli, and Tea Tvalavadze
Most of the sources on which biographies rely are textual. Therefore, the Biobibliographies of Georgian authors became more complete and reliable after greater attention began to be directed toward textual investigations. This article describes the methods and approaches that we and our colleagues have been using to create biobibliographies.
Reviews
Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Reviewed by Stephanie Russo
Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self, edited by Valérie Baisnée-Keay, Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Stephanie Genty, and Claire Bazin
Reviewed by Amy Carlson
The Photographer as Autobiographer, by Arnaud Schmitt
Reviewed by Charles Reeve
The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right, by Pramod K. Nayar
Reviewed by Martha Kuhlman
New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights, by Ana Belén Martínez García
Reviewed by Meg Jensen
Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives, edited by Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley
Reviewed by Julie Codell
False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction, by Julie Rak
Reviewed by Denisa Krásná
Global Biographies: Lived History as Method, edited by Laura Almagor, Haakon A. Ikonomou, and Gunvor Simonsen
Reviewed by Jeremy D. Popkin
Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, edited by Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess
Reviewed by Louis van den Hengel
Autobiography, Memory and Nationhood in Anglophone Africa, by David Ekanem Udoinwang and James Tar Tsaaior
Reviewed by Nick Mdika Tembo
Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories, by Adetayo Alabi
Reviewed by Nick Mdika Tembo
Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing, by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
Reviewed by Julie Rak
Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina, by Deanna Reder
Reviewed by Rachel Stubbs
Minor Salvage: The Korean War and Korean American Life Writings, by Stephen Hong Sohn
Reviewed by Heui-Yung Park
Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family: Transnational Histories Touched by National Socialism and Apartheid, by Barbara Henkes
Reviewed by Sarah Nuttall
Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914, by Matilda Greig
Reviewed by Scott Krawczyk
Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature, by Rebecca Richardson
Reviewed by Issy Brooks-Ward
Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations, edited by Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey
Reviewed by Kylie Cardell
Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir, by Richard Lischer
Reviewed by Matthew Mullins
Magical Habits, by Monica Huerta
Reviewed by Regina Marie Mills
The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity, edited by Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Purdon
Reviewed by Sara Collins
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Special Issue “Stories of Violence, War, and Displacement: Intersections of Life, Research, and Knowledge Production”
Korac, Maja (2024) Guest Editor
Genealogy 8:2 (2024) (ISSN 2313-5778).
OPEN ACCESS
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy/special_issues/Q180PT555C
by Nergis Canefe
Conversation with My Classmates: Displacement, War, and Survival
by Eva Mikuska
by Kristine Andra Avram
by Azra Hromadžić
Gender Justice and Feminist Politics: Decolonizing Collaborative Research
by Dolores Figueroa Romero
Re-Search on the Hyphen: (Re)writing the Fragmented Self within Contexts of Displacement
by Lina Fadel
by Maja Korac andCindy Horst
by Saida Hodžić
by Alison Crosby
Indigenous Research: The Path towards Mapuchization
by María Gloria Cayulef
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Hybridity in Life Writing: Combining Text and Images
Palgrave, May 2024 (Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)
Editor: Arnaud Schmitt
Overview:
Explores how text and image can be brought together to enhance autobiographical narrative
Chapters explore a range of examples of intermediality, from the eighteenth century to the present
Includes new insights into the interaction between life narratives and social media
This book offers new perspectives on text/image hybridity in the context of life writing. Each chapter explores the very topical issue of how writers and artists combine two media in order to enhance the autobiographical narrative and experience of the reader. It questions the position of images in relation to text, both on the page and in terms of the power balance between media. It also shows how hybridity operates beyond a semantic and cultural balance of power, as the combination of text and images are able to produce content that would not have been possible separately. Including a range of life writing and different visual media, from paintings and photography to graphic memoirs and social media, this edited collection investigates the point at which an image, whether fixed or moving, enters the autobiographical act and confronts the verbal form.
Table of contents (15 chapters)
Introduction
Arnaud Schmitt
Pages 1-19
I- Photography, Text, Photographic Texts
Interanimation in Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008)
Griselda Pollock
Pages 23-48
In Search of a Lost Past: Family Photography and Postmemory in Michael Ignatieff’s The Russian Album
Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty
Pages 49-66
Inserting the Manfish: Hybridity in Underwater Memoir Illustrations
Clare Brant
Pages 67-85
Beyond Authentication: The Construction of Patti Smith’s Identity Through Text and Image
Silvia Hernández Hellín
Pages 87-103
“Moving Shadows Disappearing”: Erasure of Self in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Autobiographical “Photo-essay”
Marie-Agnès Gay
Pages 105-124
The Hybrid Life Writing of Sally Mann: Capturing Human Nature in Words and Images
Anne Green Munk
Pages 125-140
Writing a Life Written in Pictures: Postmemorial Phototextualities in Helena Janeczek’s La ragazza con la Leica
Veronica Frigeni
Pages 141-161
“This Counter History”: Teju Cole’s Pandemic Visual Diary on the Kitchen as a Domestic Postcolonial Medi[t]ation
Julia Watson
Pages 163-180
II- The Materialities of Hybridity: Artists, Autobiographies, Textualities, Images and Graphic Narratives
Arenas of Hybridity
Teresa Bruś
Pages 183-198
“Leaving the marks in”: The Dialectic of Journal & Drawings by Keith Vaughan
Alex Belsey
Pages 199-215
Photography, Intermediality, and Graphic Illness Narratives
Nancy Pedri
Pages 217-240
Sounds and Silence Made Visible: Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014)
Nathalie Saudo-Welby
Pages 241-253
The Hateful Narcissism of Allie Brosh in Hyperbole and a Half (2013)
Hélène Tison
Pages 255-274
Ambiguous and Absent Imagery in Contemporary Culinary Memoirs
Virginia Terry Sherman
Pages 275-289
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-51804-1
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Book by a list member:
Olga Michael, Human Rights in Graphic Life Narrative: Reading and Witnessing Violations of ʻthe Other’ in Anglophone Works
Bloomsbury Academic
Kate Douglas, John David Zuern, Anna Poletti, Series Editors
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/human-rights-in-graphic-life-narrative-9781350329775
Short Description:
Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about people who become ‘othered’ within Western contexts, this book investigates how comics and graphic novels witness human rights transgressions in contemporary Anglophone culture and how they can promote social justice. With thought given to how the graphic form can offer a powerful counterpoint to the legal, humanitarian and media discourses that dehumanise the most violated and dispossessed, but also how these works may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the ‘other,’ Olga Michael focuses on gender, death, space, and border violence within graphic life narratives depicting suffering across different geo- and biopolitical locations. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers works by artists such as Joe Sacco, Thi Bui, Mia Kirshner, Phoebe Gloeckner, Kamel Khélif, Francesca Sanna, Gabi Froden, Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, as well as Safdar Ahmed and Ali Dorani/EatenFish.
Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as the aesthetics of visualised suffering; spatial articulations of human rights violations; the occurrence of violations whilst crossing borders; the gendered dimensions of visually captured violence; and how human rights discourses intersect with graphic depictions of the dead. In so doing, Michael establishes how to read human rights and social justice comics in relation to an escalating global crisis and deftly complicates negotiations of ‘otherness.’ A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of postcolonial decolonized reading acts as forms of secondary witness.
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Now introducing issue a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 38.3 2023!
“Life Writing at the Crossroads: Autobiographical Theory and Practice in Poland”
“Various forms of life writing have become very popular in recent decades both in Poland and abroad, and many critics emphasize that we live in times dominated by “a culture of confession.” In the present moment, life writing texts in their multifarious forms are both selected for bestseller lists and subjected to serious debates in academia. Polish writers, poets, diarists, archivists, and memoirists have actively contributed to life writing practices for centuries. Moreover, researchers agree that “autobiographism” has been one of the leading conventions and modalities of Polish literature for more than a hundred years. This special issue examines diversified autobiographical gestures in order to show how 20th- and 21st-century Polish life writing theories and practices challenge and bridge Western discourses on auto/biography, memory, travel narratives, diaries, and archives”
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/raut20/current
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Autofiction Studies Network Launches New Listserv (Auto-Fiction)
The Autofiction Studies Network is an interdisciplinary and international network devoted to autofiction studies. The network’s primary purpose is to allow for broader dissemination of information relating to autofiction studies. The network aims to facilitate a productive discussion on autofiction, inform scholars about recent publications in the field, share academic events, and promote research and exploration of the concept of autofiction.
The forum should be used for postings that connect with our subject area. Within that broad area, we encourage discussing cultural, linguistic, literary, social, historical, philosophical, practical and pedagogical matters relating to our discipline. The list is moderated by Hywel Dix of Bournemouth University and Auto/Fiction editor Shashibhusan Nayak.
Joining the list
Visit this link to join. Once you sign up, you will receive an e-mail with a confirmation link to click on. Shortly after subscribing to Auto-Fiction, you will receive a welcome message which confirms your membership. Please keep this message, which provides essential information about the functioning of the list and how to sign off when you wish to do so. If you have any questions about subscribing, please don’t hesitate to contact shashienglish@gmail.com.
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We are pleased to announce that the first articles of volume 13 of the European Journal of Life Writing are now online. The 2024 edition of the journal is off to a great start with the papers “Life Writing at the Terminus: Glacier Memoirs and Planetary Relationality” by John Zuern and “Marina Warner’s Inventory of A Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir. From Memoir to Filiation Narrative” by Souhir Zekri Masson; and a book review of Virginia Newhall Rademacher’s Derivative Lives. Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by J. Ignacio Díez.
We look forward to more publications over the coming months. When visiting our website, do also have a look at the book reviews that we finished volume 12 with: Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene edited by Ina Batzke, Lea Spinoza Garrido and Linda M. Hess, reviewed by Inés García; Élise Hugueny-Léger’s Projections de soi. Identités et images en mouvement dans l’autofiction, reviewed by Maaike Koffeman; and Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, reviewed by Bethany Lane.
Long-term followers of the journal may have notice we have been a bit quiet on social media lately. We are currently revising our social media presence and will soon share an update on this with you.
As always, you are cordially invited to publish your life writing research, book reviews and creative matters in our journal. Guidelines can be found here or you can contact us at ejlw@rug.nl if you have any questions about the process.
Warm regards, also on behalf of the journal’s board and editorial team,
Sjoerd-Jeroen MoenandarJournal Managerejlw@rug.nl
This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
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Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Third Edition
SIDONIE SMITH AND JULIA WATSON
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Life Writing, Volume 21, Issue 2, June 2024 is now available online
Conference Report
Field Culture in Unprecedented Times: Writing the Unexpected, Narrating the Future at a Virtual Conference |
Kate Douglas, Kylie Cardell, Marina Deller, Emma Maguire & Shannon Sandford
Pages: 179-195 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2296752
Essays
Couples: A Collective Life |
Joe Moran
Pages: 199-213 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2250931
‘To You, Who May Find Yourself in This Story’: What a Baker’s Memoir Taught an Emerging Education Scholar
Amber Moore
Pages: 215-221 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2160935
I Want to Become: My (Own) Reference List |
Dave Yan
Pages: 223-229 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2206258
Articles
Reflecting on Memory, Imagination and Place: Reading Janet Frame’s The Envoy from Mirror City Through a Cognitive Literary Lens
Merril Howie
Pages: 233-254 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2250928
Fantasy and Dissimulation in the Memoirs of Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926)
Rachel Mairs
Pages: 255-276 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2226834
Intercultural Mediation in the Translation of the Self in Travel Writing: A Case Study of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper
Pan Xie & Xiaoxiao Xin
Pages: 277-293 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2226363
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Georg Henrik von Wright: An Unexpected Friendship |
Päivi Kaipainen
Pages: 295-313 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2225134
Individualism, Collectivism, and Identity Politics in Palestinian Life Writing |
Eman Alasah
Pages: 315-332 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2219865
‘A Stranger in the City’: Selfhood, Community and Modes of (Un)belonging in Muhammad Iqbal’s Self-Portraitures
Saliha Shah
Pages: 333-348 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2205547
No Longer a ‘Guy’, But a ‘Flaming-Hot Mess of a Queen’: The Role of Language in Contemporary Nonbinary Autobiographical Life Writing |
Karolína Zlámalová
Pages: 349-367 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2204399
Memoir and Respectable Femininity: Shirani A. Bandaranayake’s Hold Me in Contempt
Kanchanakesi Warnapala
Pages: 369-380 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2202329
Crossing the Bamboo Curtain: Occidentalism and the English Language in Cultural Revolution Memoirs
Mai Wang
Pages: 381-400 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2201685
Survivor Memory and Rape Memoir: Chanel Miller’s Know My Name
Marta Fernández-Morales
Pages: 401-418 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2196367
Reviews
As Told by Herself: Women’s Childhood Autobiography, 1845–1969
by Lorna Martens, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022, 306 pp., ISBN: 978-0-29933-9-104
Valerie Sanders
Pages: 421-424 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2177505
Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography
by Paul John Eakin, foreword by Craig Howes, New York and London: Routledge, 2020, Pp. xxi + 151, (paperback), ISBN 978-0-367-51577-5
Jeremy D. Popkin
Pages: 425-427 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2165472
How I Lost My Mother: A Story of Life, Care and Dying
by Leslie Swartz, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2021, 222 pp., ISBN: 9781776146949
Joan C. Tronto
Pages: 429-432 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2159754
Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused
by Anita Wohlmann, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, 216 pp., ISBN 978 1 3995 0088 3
Richard Freadman
Pages: 433-436 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2207321
Correction
Correction
Pages: I-I | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2023.2234167
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Reading Mediated Life Narratives: Auto/Biographical Agency in the Book, Museum, Social Media, and Archives
by Amy Carlson
Bloomsbury
Hardback | 248 pp | February 2024 | 9781350324664 | $115.00
To purchase from Bloomsbury with the discount, click here.
Enter code GLR AQ4 at the checkout for 35% off!* ($74.75)
An exploration of how mediation can shape and control online and physical life writing texts and spaces, and how the traces of this mediation are a critical aspect of reading a life narrative.
Calling attention to the unseen mediation and re-mediation of life narratives in online and physical spaces, this ground-breaking exploration uncovers the ever-changing strategies that authors, artists, publishers, curators, archivists and social media corporations adopt to shape, control or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Concentrating on contemporary life texts found in the material book, museums, on social media and archives that present perceptions of individuality and autonomy, Reading Mediated Life Narratives exposes the traces of personal, cultural, technological, and political mediation that must be considered when developing reading strategies for such life narratives. Amy Carlson asks such questions as what agents act upon these narratives; what do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose; how do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”; and finally, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? An examination of the range of sites at which vulnerability and intervention can occur, Carlson does not condemn but stages an intercession, showing us how it is increasingly necessary to register mediated agents and processes modifying the witnessing or recuperation of original texts that could condition our reception. With careful thought on how we remember, how we create and control our pictures, voices, words, and records, Reading Mediated Life Narratives reveals how we construct and negotiate our social identities and memories, but also what systems control us.
Amy Carlson received her PhD from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in English and is the Serials librarian at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library, USA. She has published articles in Marvels and Tales and The Serials Librarian. Her research focuses on how materiality, reformatting, access, and use accentuate or limit experiences with life narrative texts.
Also available:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Amy-Carlson/dp/1350324663
Amy Carlson
Head, Serials Department
Hamilton Library
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
acarlson@hawaii.edu
808-956-7692
pronouns: she, her, hers