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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Experimental Life Writing Today (Bloomsbury 2025, New Directions in Life Narrative)

Edited by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drag

Series Editors: Kate Douglas, John David Zuern and Anna Poletti

This comprehensive volume offers compelling critical essays surveying the myriad forms of innovation in contemporary Anglophone life writing. Experimental Life Writing Today provides a historical and critical context for examining avant-garde tendencies in biography and autobiography and outlines the poetics of experimental life writing.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to a selection of experimental genres of life writing: autofiction, biofiction, paramemoir, autotheory, graphic memoir, photo-memoir, eco-memoir and the lyric essay. Part Two includes chapters concerned with the following themes, concepts and devices set in the context of experimental life writing: illness, disability, mourning, relationality, place, catalogue, narration and fragmentation.

To ensure clarity and consistency, each chapter follows the same structure: a theoretical discussion of a given notion, comprising a brief discussion of its various aspects and examples, followed by a close reading of a chosen text. Case studies are devoted to significant contemporary works by authors such as Hazel V. Carby, J. M. Coetzee, Anne Garréta, Karen Green, Vona Groarke, Han Kang, Mary Karr, Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel, Maggie Nelson, Ruth Ozeki, Mark Tredinnick, Una, D.J. Waldie and Wim Wenders. The volume is dedicated to exploring innovative forms of, and in, contemporary Anglophone life writing, and it makes an important contribution to a rich and burgeoning field of interdisciplinary practice and research.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

A Cartography of Experimental Life Writing – Wojciech Drag, University of Wroclaw, Poland; Vanessa Guignery, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France

II. Genres

1. Autofiction (Martha Swift, University of Oxford, UK)
2. Biofiction (Laura Cernat, KU Leuven, Belgium)
3. Paramemoir (Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College, USA)
4. Autotheory (Robert Kusek, Jagiellonian University, Poland)
5. Graphic memoir (Elzbieta Klimek-Dominiak, University of Wroclaw, Poland)
6. Photo-memoir (Teresa Brus, University of Wroclaw, Poland)
7. Eco-memoir (Martina Horáková, Masaryk University, Czechia)
8. Lyric essay (Laura De La Parra Fernandez, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)

III. Themes, concepts and devices

9. Illness (Maria Antonietta Struzziero, independent scholar)
10. Disability (Pawel Wojtas, University of Warsaw, Poland)
11. Mourning (Héloïse Lecomte, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France)
12. Relationality (Kim Schoof, Open University, Netherlands)
13. Place (Joseph Darlington, Futureworks Media School, UK)
14. Catalogue (Grzegorz Maziarczyk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland)
15. Narration (Zuzana Fonioková, Masaryk University, Czechia)
16. Fragmentation (Dominika Ferens, University of Wroclaw, Poland, Wojciech Drag, University of Wroclaw, Poland)

Index

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/experimental-life-writing-today-9781350529915

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European Journal of Life Writing 
A creative piece, two book reviews, and a new section 

We are pleased to announce that the fourth batch of the current volume (14) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.

Added to the 2025 edition of our journal is a creative piece: “A Cloak for Courage in the Anthropocene” by Kay Syrad.

Also available now are two book reviews:
– “Jarmila Mildorf, Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity” by Zuzana Fonioková.
– “Helena Duffy and Avril Tynan (eds.), Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics: Essays in Honour of Colin Davis” by Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar.

Finally, this batch also includes the first contribution to an exciting new section of the journal, titled “EJLW in Conversation”. Over the coming months, we plan to publish a series of interviews in this section with foundational figures in the international life writing community. The very first interview is with Monica Soeting, one of the founders of our journal and IABA/Europe. Be sure to check it out!

“‘A Good Biographer Does Not Take the Easy Way’. In Conversation with Monica Soeting” by Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar.

More publications will follow throughout the coming months.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Olivia Doidge

https://ejlw.eu/announcement/view/229

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DEAR MR. SMALLWOOD: CONFEDERATION IN THE WORDS OF THOSE WHO LIVED IT

Eds. Sonja Boon and Vicki S. Hallett

Memorial University Press, 2025

https://memorialuniversitypress.ca/Books/D/Dear-Mr.-Smallwood

Dear Mr. Smallwood considers the lives and stories of everyday Newfoundlanders and Labradorians as they navigated what was arguably the biggest political transition of their lifetimes: the entry of the former nation of Newfoundland into Confederation with Canada. Drawing on one of the province’s richest archival treasures, the letters written to J.R. Smallwood before and during his time as premier, contributors unearth the hopes, dreams, discontents, and desires of ordinary people living in an extraordinary time.

A collaborative project that brings together archival materials, personal reflections, scholarly essays, and poetic and visual responses, Dear Mr. Smallwood moves discussions beyond the polarizing figure of J.R. Smallwood and recentres the conversations about Confederation to consider how Newfoundlanders and Labradorians understood themselves and their world at the time of Confederation.

Together, these letters, reflections, and essays can be seen as a layered patchwork quilt. The letters to Smallwood—a small sampling of 250 chosen by contributors from an archival collection of thousands—are the colourful swatches that reveal not just the individual voices of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians of all ages at mid-century, but also the beating life narrative—the collective autobiography—of this place itself.

Dear Mr. Smallwood: Confederation in the words of those who lived it, edited by Sonja Boon and Vicki S. Hallett, with contributions from Angela Antle, Terry Bishop-Stirling, Jessica Bound, Andreae Callanan, J.T.H. Connor, Heidi Coombs, Linda Cullum, Elizabeth Dane, Lesley Derraugh, Violet Drake, Sheila Hallett, Joanne Harris, Gemma Hickey, Robert Hong, Daze Jefferies, Mi’sel Joe, Sharon King-Campbell, Kate Lahey, Julia Laite, Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Dave Lough, Jennifer Morgan, Emily Murphy, Sheila O’Neill, Jasmine Paul, Andrea Procter, Colleen Quigley, Shruti Raheja, Amy Sheppard, Sarah Simpson, Gina Snooks, Jocelyn Thorpe, Patricia Way, and Miriam Wright.

Sonja Boon, PhD  (she/her)

Adjunct Professor, Gender Studies, Memorial University

Mentor, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction, University of King’s College

Co-editor, Life Writing Series, WLU PressCollege of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, Royal Society of Canada

recent and forthcoming publications:

fair wind: as ships (chapbook), Pinhole Poetry, 2025.

co-editor, with Vicki Hallett, Dear Mr. Smallwood: Confederation in the words of those who lived it (Memorial University Press, 2025)

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Life Writing, Volume 22, Issue 4, December 2025 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.

This new issue contains the following articles:

Articles
Rapport-Building and Meaning-Making in Collaborative Body Map Life Writing: A New Approach for Transference of Atomic Bomb Survivors’ Memories |
Machiko Oike & Luli van der Does
Pages: 695-711 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2568845

Technologies of Automathographies: Mary Somerville and the Republic of Mathematics |
Maria Tamboukou
Pages: 712-728 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2555622

Love Letters as Testimony: An Estonian Case
Maarja Hollo
Pages: 729-740 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2555524

The Protagonist Vanishes: A Dickensian Life-Writing Mystery |
Kathryne Ford
Pages: 741-755 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2554934
The Poetics of Memory in Contemporary Spanish Poetry: Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda and Jaime Gil de Biedma
Ekaitz Ruiz de Vergara Olmos
Pages: 756-768 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2561103

You Don’t Know What War Is: Yeva Skalietska’s Diary as a Testimony and Counter-Narrative of Trauma in Conflict
Isha Srishti Panna, M. Raja Vishwanathan & Ajeesh A K
Pages: 769-782 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2555623

Writing the Self, Rewriting the Novel: Graham Greene and the Autofiction Turn
Anni Shen
Pages: 783-794 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2552298
Individuality, Collectivity, and Pluralised Diasporic Chinese Identity in British Chinese Life Writing |
Shenghao Hu
Pages: 795-806 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2547188
Writer, Work, and World(s): Stephen Spender as Autobio(mytho)grapher |
Sandra Mayer
Pages: 807-821 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2540374

Memoir as a Herstory Narrative: Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother and Azar Nafisi’s Things I’ve Been Silent About
Şule Akdoğan & Seda Coşar-Çelik
Pages: 822-844 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2537869

Coercive Control in Queer Relationships: Reframing Gender and Violence in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House |
Timothy Laurie & Hannah Stark
Pages: 845-861 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2536275

‘From Impasse to Development’: Life Writing as a Reparation in Yang Benfen’s I am Rich in Fragrance
Yuanhang Liu & Xinjian Li
Pages: 862-876 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2531070
Life-Story Narratives of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People as Sensory Autobiographies of Deafness
Russell S. Rosen
Pages: 877-896 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2531441

Writing Against Erasure: Life Narratives as Biopolitical Resistance
Lobna Ben Salem
Pages: 897-907 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2564095
Essays
Death at the Time of COVID-19 |
Val Colic-Peisker
Pages: 908-922 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2528018

Not All That: Autoforms, Narcissism, and the Neoliberal Cultural Landscape |
Libby King
Pages: 923-937 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2491442

Doctor Who? Reflecting Upon Regenerations of Educational Identity Utilising Autoethnography and the Method of Currere |
David Turner
Pages: 938-951 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2468211

Reviews
Biography across the Digitized Globe: Essays in Honour of Hans Renders
edited by David Veltman and Daniel R. Meister, Leiden, Brill, 2025, 299 pp., ISBN 978-90-04-72669-7 (hardback)
D. L. LeMahieu
Pages: 952-954 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2532951

Hanif Kureishi: Writing the Self: A Biography
by Ruvani Ranasinha, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2023, 875 pp., ISBN 9781526147394
Bénédicte Ledent
Pages: 955-958 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2503596

The Museum of Failure
by Elisabeth Hanscombe, Sydney, New South Wales, Hembury Books, 2025, 239 pp., ISBN 9781763583658
Catherine Johns
Pages: 959-961 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2492978

Reading Autobiography Now. An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
Third Edition, by Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2024, 430 pp., ISBN: 978-1-517-91688-6
Gillian Whitlock
Pages: 962-965 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2452074

Wandering from China to America: A Life Straddling Different Worlds
2nd edition, by Xiuwu R. Liu, Verlag, Stuttgart, ibidem Press, 2024, 302 pp., ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7071-5
Ruth Y.Y. Hung
Pages: 966-972 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2532950

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Miles Franklin Undercover, by Kerrie Davies, Allen & Unwin, 2025  

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Kerrie-Davies-Miles-Franklin-Undercover-9781761470936

The little known years when she created her own brilliant career.

‘A fascinating page turner’ – Director of My Brilliant Career, Gillian Armstrong.

The little-known years when she created her own brilliant career

After the success and celebrity of her coming of age novel My Brilliant Career, published when Miles Franklin was only 21, she disappeared. This is the story of the decade that made her second career as a fearless advocate for working women.

‘There is a theory that any woman can be rescued from the shoals of failure and despair by finding some man to ask her in marriage, but before I could be happy in love I should at least need to realise myself.’

She dazzled Australia with her rebellious novel My Brilliant Career, inspiring generations of young women chafing under conventional expectations. Only 21, Miles Franklin was lauded as the Bronte of the bush and feted by the rich and influential.

But fame can be deceptive. In reality, the book earned her a pittance. The family farm was sold, her new novels were rejected, and she was broke. Just two years after her debut, Miles disappeared.

In this real-life sequel to My Brilliant Career, author Kerrie Davies uncovers a little-known period in Miles’ life, from the servant’s quarters of Sydney and Melbourne’s wealthy houses to volatile Chicago, in the turbulent years after her early success. Davies draws on a never-before-published manuscript and diary extracts from Miles’ year undercover as a servant, intimate correspondence with poet Banjo Paterson, and archival sources from Australia and Chicago.

Miles Franklin Undercover is a powerful story of a young woman’s enduring resilience, and her determination to always be her own heroine.

‘A fascinating page turner.’ – Gillian Armstrong AM

‘I now feel I know Miles intimately’ – Jane Caro AM

‘A triumph of enthralling storytelling.’ – Sue Williams

‘Evocative and richly drawn, this sparkling book shows us a side to the great literary heroine that is darker and even more interesting than many Australians know.’ – Jacqueline Maley

‘A captivating read – Miles comes alive.’ – Brigitta Olubas

‘A fascinating story of an embattled talent’ – Sydney Morning Herald
 
Kerrie Davies is the author of A Wife’s Heart, that created national discussion about the iconic poet Henry Lawson and his marriage. She has appeared at the Sydney and Brisbane Writers Festivals, and the National Folk festival, Canberra. A former journalist for Vogue and the Sunday Telegraph, Kerrie is Senior Lecturer at the School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney, a 2024 Visiting Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, and writes for the Conversation.

My Brilliant Career is being adapted into a new series by Netflix (2026) starring Phillipa Northeast and Christopher Chung (Slow Horses).

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Chloe R. Green
Writing Contested Illness
Experimentation in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing
 
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-writing-contested-illness.html
 
Examines how women’s experimental illness narratives are driving new conceptions of contested illness

• Documents the emerging subgenre of experimental illness narratives
• Discusses how autobiographical experimentation is changing the narrative of contested illness
• Conducts a history of contested illness

Intervening in the gnarled lineage of gender, genre and medicine, Writing Contested Illness investigates how uncertainty, doubt and dismissal, the key features of medical contestation, are mediated and transformed in women’s experimental illness narratives. It discusses how a range of autobiographical experimentation in emerging and increasingly common subgenres like autofiction, autotheory, experimental memoir and the lyric essay, are creating productive new avenues for contested illnesses to be represented. These illnesses, which range in this book across hysteria, eating disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme disease, have been subject to constrictive medical practices, rendering the conditions illegitimate, under-studied and under-diagnosed. In observing how such narratives identify the rifts caused by medicalised contestation and identify key sites of repair within this sphere, this book argues that experimental life writing can be its own first-hand, affective and embodied source of medical knowledge.

 “How do women give voice to experiences of chronic illness which trouble or elide diagnosis, confound biomedical certainties and are the subject of enduring controversy? In this brilliant first book, Chloe R. Green shows how the formal features of experimental literary life writing play a critical role in the generation of new knowledge about contested illness. As compassionate as it is razor-sharp, Writing Contested Illness will reshape our understanding of what illness narratives can be and achieve.”– Angela Woods, Durham University
 
Acknowledgements
Series Editor’s Preface

Introduction: Contested Illnesses and Autobiographical Experimentation
1. Illness as/and Femininity: Haunted Inheritances in the Contemporary Hysteria Memoir
2. Gut Feelings: The Empathy of Disordered Eating in Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia and Amélie Nothomb’s The Life of Hunger
3. Rewriting Relationality: Care and the Familial Bonds of Illness in Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings and Marianne Brooker’s Intervals
4. Fragments, Lists and White Space: Fibromyalgia and Forms of Sympathy in Amy Berkowitz’s and Sonya Huber’s Lyric Essays
5. ‘Living in Uncertainty Was My Lot’: Porochista Khakpour’s and Meghan O’Rourke’s Chronic Lyme Memoirs
Conclusion: COVID-19, Long COVID and Hope for a Sick Future
 
Chloe R. Green is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She has published widely on the medical humanities, life writing, autofiction and affect theory, and was previously an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin.
 

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Alexandra Effe. A History of Autofiction: Cognitive and Cultural Work from 18th-Century England to Contemporary Global Anglophone Literatures. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/history-of-autofiction-9781350539570/
Mapping the largely neglected history of autofictional literature, and describing developments against socio-historical changes, cultural trends, and philosophical-psychological discussions around self and mind, this book both explores and historicizes autofiction’s contemporary boom.Beginning with the genre’s emergence in 18th-century England against changes in publishing culture and author concept, and then tracing forms and functions of autofictional literature up to the contemporary moment, A History of Autofiction highlights why select narrative strategies are abandoned, transformed, or repurposed; which forms, affordances, and effects of autofictional modes are persistent; and which were particular to a given period. With focus on salient authors and texts from anglophone autofiction around the world, and shining spotlights on insightful socio-historical and biographical contexts, Alexandra Effe foregrounds autofictional elements of works not previously considered for these dimensions and offers fresh perspectives on a range of canonical autofictional texts.

interdisciplinary in approach, the book sheds light on autofictional phenomena through research in neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind while demonstrating that autofictional literature holds insights for cognitive science. Developing a cognitive-holistic approach to the triad of author, text, and reader, the book allows for a novel and more encompassing understanding of an important current cultural trend and of its diachronic development.

Table of ContentsIntroduction

What Is Autofiction and What Can it Do?
1. A Cognitive Perspective on Fictionality
2. Autofiction as Cognitive Duality and Textual Doubling
3. Affordances and Effects

Part I: Claiming a Voice – 18th-Century Autofictional Beginnings
4. Marketing a Mutable Author Persona: “Romantick Names, and a feign’d Scene of Action” in Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella
5. Claiming the Right to Self-Publishing and Self-Editing: Alexander Pope’s “disguises
[…] of sentiment [and] style”
6. Shaping a Private Self Publicly: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy
Letters and 18th-Century Epistolary Culture
7. Deliberating “ornament of stile or diction, or even of circumstance”: Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon
8. Living Alternative Lives in Writing: Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy “shall lead
a couple of fine lives together”
Coda: From Letters, Diaries, and Transcripts to Books

Part II: Hiding in Plain Sight – Autofictional Experiments of the Long Nineteenth Century
9. Romantic Freedoms in the Search for Generic Conventions
10. Self-Formation within Victorian (Generic) Constraints
The Künstlerroman as Autofictional Hint: Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield
11. Fin-de-siècle Transgressions of Identities and Generic Modes
Coda: From Pseudo-Disguise to Explicit Displacement

Part III: Reimagining Selves and Genres – 20th- and 21st-Century Autofictional Innovations
12. Late Modernist Explorations of Genre and Self
13. Postmodernist Self-Creation and Self-Negation
14. Post-Postmodernist Collaborative World-Building

Coda: From Reader Observation to Collaboration

Conclusion

Works Cited


Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo< Norway. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (2017) co-editor of The Autofictional (2021) and Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (2023). As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.”

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CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference

Series editors: May Friedman (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Silvia Schultermandl (University of Muenster)

Please send inquiries to: may.friedman@torontomu.ca AND silvia.schultermandl@uni-muenster.de

We invite proposals that explore themes of kinship and mediated differences for our dynamic book series!

Since 2021, we have published eight volumes, which delve into a range of topics and use wide-ranging methods, with several more books scheduled for publication in the coming years. We invite monographs as well as edited collections and are excited to receive inquiries about completed projects as well as ideas that are still in development.

You can find the link to the full CFP here

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Research/Amerikanistik/research/index.html__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!QxCWV0rRpB2nRlt7Fdy7Xy2WB1SJBdZ4XTeBZC3uJ0Gt526-LWifaBsyWixFg-fj8yjaqli7rSqOm–BHKCMghHAyFk_nMU$ 

but broadly, this series is thinking through an array of responses to kinship that see the notion of family as a “working truth” that spans many biological and non-biological relationships, including those that transcend human connections and explore our kinship to the earth, artificial intelligences, and beyond. This book series aims to explore phenomena located at the intersection of technologies, including those which allow for family creation, migration, communication, reunion, and the family as a site of difference. The individual volumes in this series offer insightful analyses of the representations of these phenomena in media, social media, literature, popular culture, and corporeal settings.

Some of our books have included:
– Making Kin with Trees: A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care by Solvejg Nitzke
– The Hidden Lives of Big, Beautiful Women by Crystal Kotow
– Queer Kinship and Comparative Literature, edited by Anchit Sathi and Alice Ferrebe

This series is currently accepting proposals. To learn more, please follow this link:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Research/Amerikanistik/research/index.html__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!QxCWV0rRpB2nRlt7Fdy7Xy2WB1SJBdZ4XTeBZC3uJ0Gt526-LWifaBsyWixFg-fj8yjaqli7rSqOm–BHKCMghHAyFk_nMU$

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Le journal littéraire / El diario literario, Pau (France), PUPPA, coll. “Espaces, frontières, métissages”, 2025

 Eds. Michel Braud et Álvaro Luque Amo, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour / Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

https://recherche.univ-pau.fr/fr/productions-scientifiques/puppa/publications/collections/efm/le-journal-litteraire-el-diario-literario.html

Le journal personnel est un genre littéraire qui n’a été reconnu que progressivement au cours des deux derniers siècles, et dont l’évolution a été sensiblement différente d’une culture à l’autre. Le processus de « littérarisation » qu’il connaît n’aboutit pas exactement aux mêmes formes ni à la même reconnaissance des deux côtés des Pyrénées. Ce volume s’attache, dans une perspective contrastive, à l’étude de ces transformations dans les littératures de langues espagnole et française, d’Henri-Frédéric Amiel à Mario Levrero ou Andrés Trapiello, avec l’objectif d’illustrer les divergences et convergences dans le développement de ce genre autobiographique.
 
El diario personal ha sido sanciado como género literario en los dos últimos siglos, tras diferentes procesos que han variado considerablemente de una tradición literaria a otra. Los contextos francófono e hispanohablante ejemplifican muy bien lo anterior, pues tanto las obras como la recepción de las mismas han experimentado diferencias notables. Este volumen plantea un acercamiento comparativo a estas dos tradiciones diarísticas, desde Henri-Frédéric Amiel hasta Mario Levrero o Andrés Trapiello, con objeto de ilustrar las divergencias y convergencias en el desarrollo de este género autobiográfico.
 

Sommaire
 
Michel Braud, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour – ALTER 
Álvaro Luque Amo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Introduction/ introducción


CONTEXTE FRANCOPHONE

Géraldine Sauquet, Lycée Louis Barthou, Pau
Le Journal intime d’Henri-Frédéric Amiel, de l’écriture journalière à l’œuvre littéraire
 
Emmanuelle Calvisi, Sorbonne-Université / Université de Rouen
« Moi qui serai plus tard sans doute un grand écrivain ». Jouer au grand écrivain dans ses carnets secrets : les journaux de jeunesse de futurs auteurs au tournant du XXe siècle
 
Emmanuelle Tabet, Cellf, Sorbonne Université-CNRS
« C’est poétiquement pourtant/ Que l’homme habite sur cette terre » : écriture intime et poésie dans les derniers journaux d’Henry Bauchau
 
Sandrine Bédouret-Larraburu, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour – ALTER
De quelques journaux-sonnets, contemporains, de langue française
 
 
CONTEXTO HISPÁNICO
 
Lucía Lizarbe, Universidad de Zaragoza
Diarios (im)posibles: dilemas y variaciones del género en el Diario de Alfonso Reyes
 
Anabel Gutiérrez León, Universidad de Zaragoza
La emergencia (verbal) de la subjetividad en los diarios íntimos de Teresa Wilms Montt e Idea
Vilariño
 
Gustavo Quichiz Campos, Universidad de Zaragoza
Escritor por tiempo indefinido: Julio Ramón Ribeyro en la Agence France-Presse según su diario
 
Daniel Mesa Gancedo, Universidad de Zaragoza
El diario no figurativo: Piglia-Stupia
 
Corinne Ferrero, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour – ALTER
Entre soi et le monde : esquisse d’une po/éthique du journal (intime) littéraire. Le discours vide de Mario Levrero (2011), un modèle du genre
 
 
PERSPECTIVES / PERSPECTIVAS

Michel Braud, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour – ALTER 
Sur les conditions de ‘littérarisation’ du journal en France : notes pour une poétique
 
Alvaro Luque Amo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Un acercamiento al estado actual del diario literario en España (2019-2022)
 

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Emily Cuming. Maritime Relations: Life, Labour and Literature at the Water’s Edge, 1850–1914. Cambridge University Press, Sept. 2025.
 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/maritime-relations/FDC00751DF22798A6591DD73D62C0CB5
 
Detailing the lives of ordinary sailors, their families and the role of the sea in Britain’s long nineteenth century, Maritime Relations presents a powerful literary history from below. It draws on archival memoirs and logbooks, children’s fiction and social surveys, as well as the work of canonical writers such as Gaskell, Dickens, Conrad and Joyce. Maritime Relations highlights the workings of gender, the family, and emotions, with particular attention to the lives of women and girls. The result is an innovative reading of neglected kinship relations that spanned cities and oceans in the Victorian period and beyond. Working at the intersection of literary criticism, the blue humanities and life writing studies, Emily Cuming creatively redefines the relations between life, labour and literature at the waterly edge of the nineteenth century.
 
Emily Cuming
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
e.m.cuming@ljmu.ac.uk 

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Mothering and Inter/Generational Trauma. Demeter Press, Oct. 2025

Eds. Lamees Al Ethari, University of Waterloo & Maria Lombard, North Western University-Qatar 

Mothering and Inter/Generational Trauma

This volume examines experiences and meanings of motherhood impacted by displacement and intergenerational trauma. The collection builds upon Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which states that the “generation after [will] grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 22). The volume contextualizes concepts of postmemory through the perspectives of the mother, the mother/child relationship, and the mother/society dynamic. Through research, personal narratives, and creative and artistic reflections, the chapters construct diverse interpretations of postmemory in relation to mothering.

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This thoughtfully curated collection opens up new ways of investigating ideas of motherhood and trauma by fully embracing interdisciplinarity. The range of chapters is impressive in its diversity not only of content but of form: poetry, art, and creative non-fiction interacts with more conventional literary-critical readings, setting all of these approaches in conversation with each other.

– Dr Carol Acton, Dept of English, St Jerome’s University (University of Waterloo)

Moving beyond not only paternal legacies of trauma but also traditional concepts of motherhood the collection offers a fresh and insightful examination of maternal narratives as transmitters of transgenerational trauma. Lamees Al Ethari and Maria Lombard’s finely curated volume investigates these pressing issues through diverse genres—personal stories, academic essays, visual art, and experimental poetry. Ultimately, by confirming and extending Marianne Hirsch’s landmark study of “postmemory,” this book sheds new light on modes of intergenerational traumatic transmission (such as epigenetic transfer and systemic racism) and on therapeutic narrative strategies for coping with the trauma passed down from mothers to daughters.
Dr. Lamees Al Ethari 

Associate Professor, Teaching Stream

Co-Founder, The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop

Non-Fiction Editor, The New Quarterly 

English Language and Literature 

Faculty of Arts 

University of Waterloo

200 University Ave. West

Waterloo, ON

N2L 3G1

HH 142

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A Book by a List Member—Brigid Allen. George and Emily Eden: Pride, Privilege, Empire and the Whigs.  Lutterworth, 2024
 
Emily Eden (1797-1869) and her brother George, 2^nd Baron Auckland (1784-1849) were acknowledged as sibling partners by their friends: an unusual arrangement for members of their class at the time.  George, a bachelor politician, was appointed Governor-General of India by Prime Minister Lord Melbourne in 1835. Emily, Melbourne’s close confidante for much of her thirties, resigned herself to not marrying him and accompanied George and their youngest sister to India.  A witty and perceptive writer, she is probably best known for the letters that describe their six years in Calcutta and up the country, including a diplomatic visit to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab and the disastrous First Afghan War that followed. Her two novels, The Semi-Detached House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple (1860), date from over a quarter-century apart; the Couple, clearly the more interesting, had been written for private reasons in the early 1830s and still embarrassed the author after its release.

https://isdistribution.com/BookDetail.aspx?aId=171792
 
Brigid Allen, M.A. (Oxford), Ph.D (London), is a British private scholar: brigidallen45@gmail.com

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Jeanne-Marie Viljoen. Comics and Women’s Health. Five Stories. Springer Nature, 2025.

In case this is of interest I’ve written a new book on five memoir comics and women’s mental health.

This book discusses five recent, hand-drawn, comics memoirs of women’s mental health experiences, not easily captured in words alone. It deals with a range of mental health experiences that are not simply diagnoseable mental disorders, and do not always stem from visible physical conditions (heavy feelings, loneliness, postpartum depression, grief, schizophrenia and suicide). Yet, by also considering the formal qualities of these stories, it is able to focus on embodied aspects of experience, inflecting these with perspectives from a range of women of various ages, sexualities, genders, races and cultures. This book demonstrates how comics are an effective, interdisciplinary means of communicating women’s mental health and wellbeing.

The comics analysed in the book are:

• Alice Chipkin and Jessica Tavassoli’s (2017) ‘Eyes Too Dry’ about major depression and its effects on significant others; 
• Kabi Nagata and Sentar’s (2017) ‘My lesbian experience with loneliness’ about self-harm and eating disorders; 
• Teresa Wong’s (2019) ‘Dear Scarlet’ about postpartum depression;
• Tyler Feder’s (2020) ‘Dancing at the Pity Party’ about grief;
• Ravi Thornton’s (2014) ‘Hoax Psychosis Blues’ about schizophrenia.

It concludes by proposing some new directions and critiques of life writing and graphic medicine.

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a scholar of literary trauma studies at Adelaide University, Australia, where her focus is on contemporary literature and visual narratives in decolonial contexts of violence. Her international training and lived experience of contested places (Cyprus, South Africa and Australia) continue to drive her engagement with arts as an active means of working with marginalization and its effects on social cohesion and collective wellbeing.
 
Jeanne-Marie Viljoen / BA (Hons), MA, PhD (she/her).
 
Program Director: Bachelor of Creative Industries
Senior Lecturer contemporary literature & visual culture
UniSA Creative | University of South Australia
B1-19 Magill Campus |GPO Box 2471
+61 8 8302 4532 |  jeanne-marie.viljoen@unisa.edu.au  

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A Book by a List Member–Tartini’s Rest: A Tale of Brothers, Secrets, and Discord, by Robert Fraser

“Robert Fraser’s latest book crosses the carefully policed boundary between life-writing and fiction”

Robert Fraser. Tartini’s Rest: A Tale of Brothers, Secrets, and Discord. Cranthorpe Millner Publishers, 2025.

ISBN: 9781803782911

https://www.thenile.com.au/books/robert-fraser/tartinis-rest/9781803782911?srsltid=AfmBOoo3RaIuTHL1EaKxEo3cgLTaXSgjUjHup4FDbW5jDyFiAOHYpIfk
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“Without Contraries is no progression.” – William Blake

Bertram and Eustace are brothers, yet worlds apart. Bertram is extroverted, practical, a celebrity basking in social success. Eustace is introverted, scholarly, and cloaked in shy obliqueness. They remain enigmas to each other, understanding neither themselves nor their sibling. Instead, they communicate through stories, building walls as much as bridges.

But two figures see beyond their carefully constructed facades: their cousin Mimi, a retired violinist residing in the enigmatic ‘Tartini’s Rest’, and Kariba, a literary genius from Africa, who is both Bertram’s nemesis and Eustace’s cherished fraternal friend.

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Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

volume 47, no. 1

Available on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55323

A brief word about the contents. The Annual Bibliography contains over 1,000 annotated entries, documenting the critical, theoretical, interdisciplinary, and international scholarship in life writing for the year 2023. The International Year in Review, offers commentary on what a topic of compelling interest to the author from where they are situated in the world.

Editors’ Notes

International Year in Review

Fragmentation, Hybridity, and Unruliness in Graphic Art: The Year in Australia

Shannon Sandford

Pentimento and Mourning in Eunice Penna Kehl’s Diaries: The Year in Brazil

Daniele Ribeiro Fortuna

Kate Beaton’s Ducks: The Year in Canada

Julie Rak

Scholarly Practices of Life Writing: The Year in China

Chen Fan

The Long Shadows of Mental Illness: The Year in Denmark

Inger Glavind Bo

Portraits of Another Era: The Year in Greece

Eirini D. Kotsovili

Bitter Water: The Year in Hungary

Helga Lenart-Cheng

Ghost Effects: The Year in Ireland

Anne Mulhall

Fighting Silence, Fighting Death: The Year in Italy

Viviana Pezzullo

Autobiography as Lebano-Pathography: The Year in Lebanon

Anthony El G.

The Life of Montserrat Pecanins and the Making of Cultural History: The Year in Mexico

Graciela de Garay

Between Hope and Fear: The Year in the Netherlands

Leonieke Vermeer

Calling Love by Its Name: The Year in Poland

Agnieszka Sobolewska Alsberg

Burning Alive: The Year in Romania

Ioana Luca

Looking Back at the Ancien Régime Crisis through the Lens of Biography: The Year in Spain

Naiara Ardanaz-Iñarga

Gateless Gates in Trans Memoir: The Year in the United States

Teagan Bradway

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2023

Compiled by Caroline Zuckerman

Books

Edited Collections and Special Issues

Articles and Essays

Dissertations

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Life Writing, Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2025 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.

This new issue contains the following articles:

Articles

The Politics of Shame in Musa Okwonga’s One of Them: An Eton College Memoir |
Minna Niemi
Pages: 453-468 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2475301

Scrambling (for) Time: Experimental Diaries and Feminised Work |
Charlotte J. Fabricius & Emily J. Hogg
Pages: 469-488 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2431877

These are War Stories: Therapeutic Citizenships and Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York
Meenakshi Srihari
Pages: 489-503 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2428627

Discerning the Autobiographical in English Court of Chancery Town Depositions
Jessica L. Malay, Mary Chadwick & Daniel Patterson
Pages: 504-524 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2449349

‘I Shall Know It Well Enough When I Feel It’: Sensing the Moment in Montaigne, Woolf and Borges
Mario Aquilina
Pages: 525-542 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2442319

Echoes of Li Sao: The Reinvention of Exile in Bei Dao’s Sidetracks
Kent Su
Pages: 543-561 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2454690

Essays
Writing Disability and Breaking Language: A Collaborative Essay
Shahd Alshammari & Esra’ M. Abdelzaher
Pages: 562-575 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2025.2462533

Berries of the Lost Garden: Narrating the Life and Legacy of an Iconic Architect
Sahand Lotfi & Mahsa Sholeh
Pages: 576-602 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2430667

An Autoethnographic Perspective on Scholarly Impact, Citation Politics, and North–South Power Dynamics |
Suleman Lazarus
Pages: 603-629 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2430666

Objects as Armour; Objects as Container: Form and Thing-Writing as Means of Balancing Disclosure in Life Writing |
Gemma Nisbet
Pages: 630-649 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2375648

Affective Ambush: An Autotheoretical Approach to Understanding Emotions as Useful to the Research Process |
Emma Maguire & Marina Deller
Pages: 650-670 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2344002

Reviews
Journeys of Transformation: Searching for No-Self in Western Buddhist Travel Narratives
by John Barbour, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 334 pp., ISBN 978-1-009-09883-0
Kyle Garton-Gundling
Pages: 671-674 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2432768

Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling
by Gwyneth Lewis, Wales, UK, Calon Books, 2024, 224 pp., $44.99 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 915279 90 3
Elisabeth Hanscombe
Pages: 675-678 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2428506

Image of a Man: The Journal of Keith Vaughan
by Alex Belsey, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2023, 270 pages, ISBN 978-1-78962-029-0 (First published in 2020 by Liverpool University Press)
Marleen Rensen
Pages: 679-682 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2411115

Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel
by Claus Elholm Andersen, New York, State University of New York Press, 2023, 252 pages, (Hardcover), ISBN 9781438495668, December 2023
Arnaud Schmitt
Pages: 683-686 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2388440

Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed
by Kathleen Watt, New York, Heliotrope Books, 2023, 384pp., ISBN 9781956474343
Franziska Gygax
Pages: 687-690 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2392353

The Song of the Whole Wide World: On Grief, Motherhood and Poetry
by Tamarin Norwood, London, The Indigo Press, 2024, 142 pp., ISBN: 978-1911648734
Gwyneth Lewis
Pages: 691-694 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2384755

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Join Our Crew! Volunteering with H-Autofiction

H-Autofiction is eager to collaborate with scholars in our field of study. If you haven’t done so, please take the time to acquaint yourself with our various activities. We are run by an all-volunteer academic editorial team that offers flexible scheduling and opportunities to work collaboratively with people in your field and to design and develop academic projects.

Open Positions

 New Publications Editors

H-Autofiction is seeking to recruit one or more editors who can help our scholarly community track new publications. Teachers and scholars of all ranks and areas of specialization are encouraged to apply. Core tasks involved will include compiling a monthly publications update based on subscriber submissions and helping to catalog bibliographic resources. New publications editors will also be encouraged to conduct interviews (via email/Zoom) with external scholars about recent works, as fits with the editors’ interests and availability.

H-Autofiction operates on a volunteer model that relies on flexible scheduling and regular collaboration. We credit our volunteers for their hard work and aim to keep all labor intellectually and professionally engaging. If interested in joining our team, please email me at editorial-Autofiction@mail.h-net.org  with a C.V. and approximately 200 words about your areas of scholarly interest and, briefly, your expected time availability over the next two years. 

Book Reviews Editor

The editors of H-Autofiction invite applications to join the H-Autofiction editorial board as review editors under the umbrella of H-Net Reviews. 

H-Net Reviews has been publishing online scholarly reviews since 1993, taking advantage of the speed and flexibility of the online format while maintaining the highest scholarly standards, with tens of thousands of reviews in the archive to date. Since H-Net’s inception nearly 30 years ago, H-Net has relied on volunteers to keep its networks running. H-Net Reviews has published nearly 50,000 reviews and prides itself on its quicker-than-average turnaround and opportunities for scholarly discussion of reviews.

Review editors commission and edit reviews of recent publications, digital media, films, teaching content, or other material of interest to network subscribers. Review editors should have strong qualifications (Ph.D.) in English (Life Writing)  or allied disciplines. 

Prospective review editors should possess tact, editorial competence, and a willingness to commit to a two-year term. H-Net handles all book ordering and mailing and provides professional copyediting for every review. H-Autofiction reviews are sent out to the network’s subscribers and   subscribers to the H-Review listserv. Reviews are available on the main page of H-Net Reviews, which receives 1.6 million views annually. A weekly digest of all reviews is circulated among the 18,000 subscribers to H-Announce. All reviews remain free and accessible in perpetuity on the H-Net Commons.

Review editors who wish to collaborate on shaping H-Autofiction reviews program are especially encouraged to apply. Scholars who wish to write reviews for H-Autofiction are also invited to get in touch.

For more information, please email Shashibhusan Nayak, H-Autofiction’s  Editor, at  editorial-Autofiction@mail.h-net.org. 

Those interested in applying should submit a short introductory letter of 1-2 paragraphs expressing their interest and a CV.

Contact Information:

Shashibhusan Nayak

Editor – H-Autofiction 

 Email – editorial-Autofiction@mail.h-net.org

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Announcing the Launch of H-Autofiction

H-Net is pleased to announce the launch of a new network: H-Autofiction.

We invite you to subscribe for updates or request full membership at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-autofiction

H-Autofiction aspires to cultivate an inclusive and intellectually vibrant forum dedicated to the scholarly exploration of autofiction as both a critical framework and a creative practice. The network welcomes academics, researchers, educators, writers, and scholars working in autofiction and related fields, with a shared interest in the dynamic interplay among narrative, identity, and truth.

The network will disseminate a wide range of scholarly resources, including calls for papers, job announcements, blog posts, open-access materials, funding opportunities, and more. The editors are committed to fostering a collaborative environment in which members can pose questions, share pedagogical and research resources, and build connections with fellow scholars engaged in autofiction studies.

As the community evolves, the editorial team will seek to highlight and support significant research initiatives by integrating them into the network’s ongoing discourse.

For inquiries or expressions of interest in contributing to H-Autofiction, please contact the editorial team at: editorial-autofiction@mail.h-net.org. 

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New book announcement:

Xiuwu R. Liu, Wandering from China to America: A Life Straddling Different Worlds, 2nd ed., Stuttgart, ibidem Press, 2024, 302 pp., ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7071-5.

Ruth Hung published a 6+-page review online in Life Writing, saying: 

Xiuwu R. Liu’s Wandering from China to America: A Life Straddling Different Worlds fundamentally reconfigures the autobiographical project. It operates at the intersection of multiple life writing subgenres, exemplifying a situated subjectivitycharacteristic of contemporary autobiography—a self constructed through distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. Within it, I see a rich and diverse archive of self-representation that encompasses reflections on cross-cultural experiences, pedagogical insights, and critiques of institutions. In this sense, the book offers a fresh rejoinder to the Western autobiographical tradition—from the oldest type of confessional introspection to the contemporary memoir’s therapeutic ethos—by turning the autobiographical gaze outward toward institutional structures and cultural assumptions. Liu’s approach creates a critical intervention that transforms our understanding of what autobiography can do and be in the contemporary moment.

For the blurb and other info, please see amazon.com‘s book page here: https://www.amazon.com/Wandering-China-America-Straddling-Different/dp/3838210719/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.80KGDOghQKdU9nDQhI0uN7_wrRIuoEt4CwTJcQWVXgviQKZ0QHFQkXxBD-Hja1LXcn4P1JUDCMFFLWm4oL29pA.YX8OpXd3jlJD2p2ObShfEdYIH0h4mj-uwhrO2l8CVSc&qid=1754190369&sr=1-1

Thank you.

Xiuwu

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Great News! Season Three of the podcast Biographers in Conversation, just launched with an announcement of the winners of 2025 Australia’s National Biography Award. The first episode is a conversation with Abbas El-Zein about his choices while crafting Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars, winner of the award. The second episode is a conversation with Nikos Papastergiadis about his braided memoir and biography, John Berger and Me, which won the 2025 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work. 
 
Other episodes include conversations with Sam Elkin (Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga); Megan Marshall (After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart); Heather Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath); Charlotte Decroes Jacobs (90 Seconds to Midnight: A Hiroshima Survivor’s Nuclear Odyssey); Malcolm Allbrook (Reframing Indigenous Biography); Judith Brett (Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics); Jeffrey Meyers (Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath); Ray Boomhower (The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World); Sebastian Smee (Paris in Ruins: How Love, War and Art Gave Birth to Impressionism) and Stephen J. Campbell (Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life).
 
Stay tuned along with the podcast’s listeners in 81 countries for inspiring conversations each week about biographers’ choices while crafting life stories.
 
If you are a biographer and would like to be a guest on Biographers in Conversation, please email Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies at gabriella@shareyourlifestory.com.au.
 
 
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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a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 40, Issue 2 (2025)
40 Years of Auto/biography Studies: An a/b Anniversary Issue Edited by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, Eva Karpinski, Nicole Stamant, Christopher Hogarth, and Elizabeth Rodrigues

Editorial
In Honor of a/b’s 40th: An Editors’ Introduction
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
Pages: 311-336

Foreword
Celebrating the 40th Anniversary Issue of a/b: An Autobiographical Foreword
Julia Watson
Pages: 337-344

Essays
Creating and Sustaining a Journal: Instituting Collaboration, Continuing Collaboration
Joseph Hogan & Rebecca Hogan
Pages: 345-353

What Isn’t Autobiography?: The Sequel
Martin Danahay
Pages: 355-359

A Lively, Vibrant, Endlessly Interesting Field
Thomas Russell Smith
Pages: 361-364

Participating in the International Formation of The Autobiography Society and Its Flagship Journal a|b: Auto|Biography Studies
Alfred Hornung
Pages: 365-371

The Subject of Autobiography, University of Southern Maine, 1989: How a Conference Demonstrated Critical Mass
Leigh Gilmore
Pages: 373-377

Forty Years of Life Writing Scholarly Brilliance
Joycelyn K. Moody
Pages: 379-381

Heide Hall and Out County P
Emily Hipchen
Pages: 383-385

A Call to Action: Increasing Access, Inclusion and Collaboration in the Life Writing Community
Laura J. Beard
Pages: 387-392

Interviews
“Publishing Good Work on Life-Writing Genres”: An Interview with William L. Andrews
Nicole Stamant
Pages: 393-398

Ten Years of a/b: An Interview with Ricia Anne Chansky
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
Pages: 399-414

Associate Editors in Conversation: Sarah Brophy and Eva C. Karpinski
Sarah Brophy & Eva C. Karpinski
Pages: 415-422

The Hogan Prize
The Hogan Prize, 2015–2024
Pages: 423-428

The 2020 Hogan Prize
Pages: 429-432

The 2021 Hogan Prize
Pages: 433-434

The 2022 Hogan Prize
Pages: 435-437

The 2023 Hogan Prize
Pages: 439-441

The 2024 Hogan Prize
Rocio G. Davis
Pages: 443-445

The Hogan Prize: Testimonials
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: The 2016 Hogan Prize
Arnaud Schmitt
Pages: 447-449

Radical Connections: Genealogy, Small Lives, Big Data: The 2017 Hogan Prize
Julie Rak
Pages: 451-452

Milk Poems and Blood Poems: The 2018 Hogan Prize
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
Pages: 453-455

Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly: The 2019 Hogan Prize
Margaretta Jolly
Pages: 457-458

The Timothy Dow Adams Award
The Timothy Dow Adams Award
Pages: 459-462

The 2025 Timothy Dow Adams Awards
Pages: 463-464

The Legacies of Timothy Dow Adams: Award Testimonials
New Possibilities and a Return to Academic Life: A 2019 Timothy Dow Adams Award Recipient
Sandra Piñasco
Pages: 465-466

Promise of the Timothy Dow Adams Award to a Global South Scholar: A 2016 Timothy Dow Adams Award Recipient
Nick Mdika Tembo
Pages: 467-469

“‘I Wish to be Seen: ‘Umar ibn Said’”: A 2015 Timothy Dow Adams Award Recipient
Zeinab McHeimech
Pages: 471-472

Book Reviews
Rev. of “Weighing in on Smith and Watson”
Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives SIDONIE SMITH AND JULIA WATSON, Minnesota University Press, 2024, 430 pp., $27 (Paperback), ISBN 9781517916886
Julie Rak
Pages: 473-476

Rev. of Hybridity in Life Writing: Combining Text and Images
Edited by ARNAUD SCHMITT, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 296 pp., €160.49 (eBook), ISBN 978-3-031-51803-4
Beth Kearney
Pages: 477-481

Rev. of The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism
TRENT MASIKI, University of Chapel Hill Press, 2023, 252 pp., (Paperback), ISBN 978-1-4696-7527-5
Guadalupe Escobar
Pages: 481-485

Rev. of Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego
By CHRISTOPHER HOGARTH, Routledge, 2023, 196 pp., $54.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781032067919
Madeline Bedecarré
Pages: 485-487

Rev. of Memoirs of Race, Color and Belonging
NICOLE STAMANT Routledge, 2022 192 pp., $43.99 (Paperback), ISBN 9781032213804
Caroline Streeter
Pages: 488-492

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Karen Fang, Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong (Rutgers University Press, 2025)

You may not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you’ve likely been enchanted by his work. Best known as the lead concept artist on Disney’s beloved Bambi, Wong created the film’s ethereal, dreamlike landscapes—imagery that helped define its enduring emotional power and visual identity. Wong’s delicate, Asian-influenced style also graced bestselling Hallmark Christmas cards, shaping the American visual imagination across generations. During a nearly 30-year tenure at Warner Bros., Wong contributed to some of Hollywood’s most iconic films, including Camelot and Rebel Without a Cause. Yet, his story begins far from Hollywood red carpets—in the Angel Island immigration detention center, where he arrived as a 10-year-old boy under a false identity, a “paper son,” due to the racist restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

In BACKGROUND ARTIST: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong (Rutgers University Press), author and scholar Karen Fang delivers the first and only full-length biography of this quietly groundbreaking figure, chronicling not only Wong’s rich artistic legacy but also the complex cultural and political landscape he navigated as a Chinese American immigrant during a century of seismic change. Packed with vivid details, Fang’s narrative unveils a kaleidoscopic exploration of the immigrant origins behind some of America’s most beloved imagery.

KAREN FANG is a film scholar and cultural critic who writes for museums and film festivals around the world. She is a professor of English at the University of Houston, and her previous books include Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film and Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship.  

2025 Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award, Honorable Mention, Adult Nonfiction

Praise for BACKGROUND ARTIST

“The definitive new biography.”

 ― Smithsonian Magazine

“…A worthy tribute to a groundbreaking artist.”

― Publishers Weekly

“Fang tells the wider and deeper story of Wong as an Asian who expressed life through his art.”

― Disney Examiner

“Background Artist is a stunning achievement.”

―Pamela Tom, director of award-winning

PBS American Masters documentary, Tyrus

“A much-needed addition to the annals of Chinese American history.”

―Katie Gee Salisbury, Half-Caste Woman

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/delaware/background-artist/9781978838413/

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From Calvin to Mao and Beyond: A Memoir
Ed Porter
St. Andrews Press, 2023
 
Edgar A. Porter is the author of “From Calvin to Mao and Beyond,” his 2023 memoir on growing up Presbyterian in apartheid, Jim Crow south, then leaving there to engage in progressive political movements and international education in China, Japan, Hawaii and Austria. He has published numerous journal and popular press articles, as well as five books on Asian history and politics. He served as Pro Vice President for International Affairs and Faculty Development, as well as Dean of Academic Affairs, at Japan’s Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, where he was awarded Emeritus Professor status in 2016. He also served as Dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai’i, visiting professor at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences and Instructor at Henan Normal University in China. He resides in Brooklyn, New York.
 
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Porter takes readers along on his life’s journey through places and personal events not as a lost, self-centered wanderer nor as a clueless tourist but as a traveler that seeks and finds his way towards chosen destinations in the United States and Asia. In this travel, his early 1960s Christian and radical idealism meets realities disturbing to him without his falling prey to cynicism. Instead, he becomes even more open to listening to the stories of others and learning from them. He assists persons to meaningfully connect with others. He creates a network of friends. He becomes a helpful academic administrator opening others to personal educational experiences. In his traveling, he is sustained by the supportive love of family and the dynamic love in a marriage partnership. In engaging with his stories, readers are encouraged to reflect on their own life journeys, identify its crucial events, and sense its deeper meaning. Readers through attentive reading may find advice as how to be a humane and hopeful traveler in an increasingly harsh and troubling world. –
 
Neal Bushoven, Distinguished Professor of Politics Emeritus, St. Andrews University
 
Late in his memoir From Calvin to Mao and Beyond, Porter describes joining a demonstration with his wife to protest the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and his sons’ feeling of embarrassment to see their parents engaged in protest. This is why Ed’s memoir is so important: it explains for future generations how his own Boomer generation evolved through struggles against racism, the Vietnam War, and myriad forms of oppression, both at home and internationally. I believe the book will be an important resource for future scholars interested in the social and political events of the mid to late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It’s also a tremendously fun read. What an amazing life! –
 
John Lawson, Professor of English (retired), Robert Morris University
 
amazon.com/author/edgaraporter

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A Book by a List Member
 
John D. Barbour. Family Conscience: A Memoir of Four Generations. Cascade Books, 2025.
 
This memoir explores the role of conscience in four generations during a century of family history. It begins with the suicide of Barbour’s maternal grandfather and the impact of this traumatic event. Later chapters describe his interactions with other grandparents, parents, two uncles, siblings, a former spouse, and two sons. Family Conscience depicts the values and patterns of self-assessment that members of this family share and also the ways their differing moral views have been influenced by interactions with one another. Barbour interprets how he and family members have understood work and vocation, religious commitments, political and economic values, choices about marriage and raising children, conflicts within the family, and other situations and issues. This thematic family memoir blends the genres of biography, oral interview, autobiography, essay, and cultural history as Barbour depicts how conscience was transmitted and transformed through the generations.
 
John D. Barbour is professor of religion emeritus at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught from 1982 to 2018 and served as Martin Marty Chair of Religion and the Academy and Boldt Chair in the Humanities. He wrote five scholarly books, most recently Journeys of Transformation (2022), as well as Renunciation: A Novel (Resource Publications, 2013).
 
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“Family Conscience is an extraordinary memoir. Tracing the various manifestations of conscience in his Protestant Midwestern family over several generations, Barbour illuminates the way in which ‘family values,’ whether adopted or resisted, can persist and shape behavior for decades. At the same time, his book is an acute inquiry into—and demonstration of—the ethics of writing about one’s relatives. It is an impressive achievement.”

—G. Thomas Couser, Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University

“‘The unexamined life is not worth living’—so said Socrates. In Family Conscience, John D. Barbour re-examines several of his long-standing intellectual concerns—solitude, ethics, spirituality and its precarity—in light of his most intimate personal relations. The nature and challenges of conscience hold his narrative together, and the result is a memoir that draws readers deeply into personal reflection on the meaning of their own lives and those of others. Socrates would approve.”

—Craig Howes, Professor of English, University of Hawaiʻi

“Drawing on detailed interviews, journal entries, letters, and photographs, John Barbour intricately mines his family’s past for clues about how moral conscience develops. From host homes in India to work camps in Germany, this generational memoir investigates the places, events, conversations, and relationships that form our personal understanding of right and wrong. With compassion and curiosity, Barbour eloquently investigates how war, marriage, parenting, suicide, religion, community, and vocation affect the moral dimensions of one family. But Barbour is also acutely aware of the mutability of memory; woven through the book are his interrogations of his own writerly motives and his family’s mixed response to his observations. The result is a lucid, wise, and engaging memoir that offers a moving example of why searching for truth is both a fraught and necessary endeavor.”

—Kaethe Schwehn, Associate Professor of Practice in English, St. Olaf College

“Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Family Conscience provides a genealogy of the values of four generations of an accomplished and morally aspiring clan. As honest as it is tender, Barbour’s study is rife with illuminating reflections on the nature of conscience considered as an amalgam of reason, desire, and history. Life’s moral complexity is brought home with engaging stories and the author’s willingness to give voice to relatives with conflicting perspectives on family history.”

—Gordon Marino, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, St. Olaf College
 
https://wipfandstock.com/9781532636370/family-conscience/

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New cluster: Life Writing in Times of Crisis; Creative Matters–European Journal of Life Writing

New cluster: Life Writing in Times of Crisis; Creative Matters; book review

We are pleased to announce that we have just published a new cluster, “Life Writing in Times of Crisis,” edited by Paweł Rodak and Teresa Bruś.This cluster collects six papers that were originally presented at the IABA/Europe conference of the same name, held  in  Warsaw  from  July  5–8,  2023. You can read these papers and the guest editors’ introduction at the European Journal of Life Writing website:

– Cluster introduction, “Life Writing in Times of Crisis” by Teresa Bruś and Paweł Rodak.

– “The Autobiographical Triangle – and Then What?”  by Małgorzata Czermińska.

– “Psychoanalysis and Biography in Times of Crisis: Freud’s Late Correspondence with Marie Bonaparte” by Agnieszka Sobolewska Alsberg.

– “Narratives of Homesteading in Times of Crisis: Peasant Economies in the Light of Interwar Polish Diaries” by Marta Rakoczy. 

– “Wartime Diaries: Diaristic Forms of Recording Borderline Situations” by Jacek Leociak.

– “Prison Epistolarity and the Crisis of Politically Motivated Incarceration in the Letters of Abd al-Azim Anis” by Rowa Nabil. 

– “Coming Out as a Secular Rite of Passage – a Lived Experience Study Based on Diary Narratives of the Polish LGBTQ+ Community” by Joanna Anczaruk.  

Clusters are how we call ‘special issues’ at this journal. We thank the guest editors for their hard work. 

Also recently published is the following content:

– A creative non fiction piece, “The Fence,” by Laura Malacart.

– An interview with Deborah Levy, “Two Silver Herrings for My Granddaughter”: Central Europe, Poland, and Transnational Affinities,” by Robert Kusek & Wojciech Szymański.

– A book review of Eleanor Paynter’s Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present by Violetta Ravagnoli.

We cordially invite you to read these and other items at the journal’s website.  All contributions to our journal are completely open access. 

Kind regards,

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Journal Manager

Visit our website to read the full announcement.

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We are very pleased to announce the publication of Vulnérabilité et radicalité : Écritures de soi britanniques et américaines contemporaines, edited by Aude Haffen and Nelly Mok, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2025.
 
https://www.pub-editions.fr/fr/default-category/5367-vulnerabilite-et-radicalite
 
Autobiographies imply the exposure of the author’s private self. They may also involve an ethical or activist desire to bear witness. The singularity of this collected volume’s perspective is that it brings together two notions that are often considered mutually exclusive, the vulnerable and the radical. Our premise is that first-person testimonies of oppression and resistance, through their very exposure of human precariousness, deploy a radical ability to unsettle assumptions, convey critical dissent and bring forth their readers’ ethical and political responses. The texts discussed here are prose narratives and poems, and range from the modernist period to twenty-first-century literary experiments. They express personal breakdowns as well as the effects on individuals and communities of social and political violence. The questions addressed by the contributors, such as trauma, gender, race, minority sexualities, and how subjectivities are disciplined but also empowered, go beyond the field of literary studies and may interest scholars from all branches of the humanities. The chapters are in French or in English.
 
Table of contents :
 
Aude Haffen et Nelly Mok
Introduction (in French).
 
Élisabeth Bouzonviller
Dire ou occulter la « vraie nuit de l’âme » dans les essais autobiographiques de F. Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald.
 
Floriane Reviron-Piégay.
Souriez, s’il vous plaît de Jean Rhys : entre abjection de soi et vide existentiel, l’autobiographie comme figuration.
 
Aude Haffen
Survie et dissidence chez Derek Jarman et David Feinberg.
 
Jennifer K. Dick
The Nonsingular Self: A Study of Bhanu Kapil’s and Eleni Sikelianos’ Poetic Autobiographical Writing.
 
Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni
“I don’t quite recognize myself in my reflection anymore”: Conversation with Herself as Conversation with History and Mask Dismantling in Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code.
 
Nicole Ollier
Être soi après le retour des camps d’internement japonais en Amérique, avec Amy Uyematsu, 30 Miles From J-Town.
 
Claudine Raynaud
The Mississippi Memoir as Tombeau: Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. A Memoir.
 
Nelly Mok
« Je voulais que les lecteurs soient là. » Catharsis et interpellation éthique dans D’abord, ils ont tué mon père, de Loung Ung.

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European Journal of Life Writing–Life Narrative and the Digital: Full cluster online now

We are pleased to announce that the cluster “Life Narrative and the Digital”, edited by Sandra Mayer and Timo Frühwirth, has been expanded with three papers and two editorials and can now be read in full at the European Journal of Life Writing website.

The cluster makes a timely contribution to the study of life narrative with a focus on the digital. Like all contributions to our journal, it is completely open access. The following content has been added to the cluster:

– Cluster introduction, “Life Narrative and the Digital: Outlining the Contours of an Emerging Field” by Timo Frühwirth and Sandra Mayer. 

– “The Digital Life Narrative of a Romanian Transgender: Microcelebrity through the Lens of Networked Publics”  by Alexandra Cotoc and Anamaria Radu.

– “About Disputed Existences: Dys4ia’s Conflicted Status between Game and Autobiography” by Felix Tenhaef

– “Narration Through Data: The Life and Relationships of a Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Merchant” by Emiliano Degl’Innocenti, Alessia Spadi and Federica Spinelli. 

– A transcript of a roundtable discussion, “‘To Bring Them into Dialog’: A Conversation about Life Narrative and the Digital” with Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Anna Spitzbart, Christian Wachter, Florian Windhager and Sandra Mayer.

Clusters are how we call ‘special issues’ at this journal. We thank the guest editors for their hard work and cordially invite you to read these and other works at the journal’s website. 

Kind regards,

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Journal Manager

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Daniela Spenser, Echoes of Exile: A Family´s Odyssey through the Holocaust and Cold War. The University of Alabama Press, 2025.
 
A sweeping exploration of survival, resilience, and the fate of one family amid Europe’s most turbulent century
 
In Echoes of Exile, Daniela Spenser reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Her resulting work is a fascinating hybrid that combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
 
Spenser’s fascinating work reveals the difficult choices her mother and family faced, the tests to their loves and loyalties, and the lingering scars of exile. More than a family history, it weaves personal and historical narratives with mundane and momentous threads to create a fresh, distinctive fabric. Spenser recovers fragments of the past that contribute to a map of the present and possibilities for the future. An engrossing account of survival, resilience, and the enduring human spirit amid the maelstrom of Europe’s savage twentieth century, Echoes of Exile will interest readers who value firsthand accounts of significant events and who seek to understand the complexities of survival, identity, and political change through intimate, lived experiences.
 
https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817362119/echoes-of-exile/
 
Receive a 30% Discount with Promo Code BAMA.
 
For more information, contact:
 
Samantha Huff-Robertson • sjhuffrobertson@ua.edu • (205) 348-1566
To order with discount code, call 800-621-2736 or visit www.uapress.ua.edu.
6 × 9 / 320 Pages / 13 B&W Photos / 5 Maps
ISBN 978-0-8173-6211-9 / $34.95s Paper
ISBN 978-0-8173-9566-7 / $34.95 Ebook
Special Pricing: $24.47
(Discount expires 12/31/2025)
 
Spenser is a research fellow at CIESAS (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico City. Her previous book was a biography of the Mexican labor leader. In Combat: the Life of Lombardo Toledano, Brill, 2020.

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We are happy to announce the publication of a Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas special issue on Performing Selves in the 21st Century, edited by Zuzana Fonioková and Jarmila Mildorf. The papers included in this issue expose and analyze the strong inclination of 21st-century self-representation acts towards self-performance and self-invention. All the papers can be accessed

here

Contents:

Fonioková, Zuzana, and Jarmila Mildorf. “Performing Selves in the 21st Century: Introduction”

Effe, Alexandra. “Autofictional Books in Times of Digital Self-Performance and Post-Truth Sentiments”

Kusek, Robert. “After Auto/Biography: The Rise of New Autofiction and Rachel Cusk’s “Delegated Performances””

Fonioková, Zuzana. “The Changing Ways of Writing and Reading Autobiography and Autofiction: Self as Performance in Jan Němec’s Ways of Writing about Love”

Tlustý, Jan. “The Many Lives in Ota Filip’s Autobiographies”

Mildorf, Jarmila. “Telling Oneself through Someone Else’s Life: Jeannette Walls’s Half Broke Horses”

Bielawa, Jacek. “Towards a Model of Conversion in Modern Self Life Writing”

Kotásek, Miroslav. ““Here-and-Now“ the Time-Life is Recorded/Played Back: Kenneth Goldsmith Performs Living through Writing”

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Zuzana Fonioková, Ph.D.

Masarykova univerzita / Masaryk University

Filozofická fakulta / Faculty of Arts

Ústav české literatury / Department of Czech Literature

Arna Nováka 1

602 00 Brno

Czech Republic

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Linda Devereux and Nicky Moxey, eds. Exploring Boarding School Challenges for Women and Third Culture Kids. Worlds Away from Home. Routledge, 2025
 
Through personal testimonies, this book offers insights into the boarding school experiences of women and third culture kids (TCKs), examining the particular challenges for those who are sent away from their families and all that is familiar to board in a country that feels worlds away from home.
The stereotype of expatriate families is of glamorous lives lived in exotic locations with access to wealth and privilege. However, many of these families feel pressure to send their children ‘home’ to boarding school in their passport country without understanding the long-term implications of this choice. This book explores such long-term effects, starting with laying an accessible theoretical framework for the reader by drawing on scholarship from the fields of psychology, the study of TCKs (those who have spent a significant part of their childhood living in a country that this not their passport country because of their parents’ work), and the growing understanding of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The text then moves into the personal testimonies of 16 individuals, most of whom are TCKs or cross-cultural boarders, shedding light on the particular challenges they’ve faced.
The book ends by offering hope and help with chapters providing insights and practical strategies for supporting those affected by boarding school.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Linda Devereux and Nicky Moxey  

2. Stepping from denial into curiosity: Boarding school through an attachment-trauma lens

Suzanne Zeedyk 

3. Transcultural Childhoods, Third Culture Kids and Boarding School 

Linda Devereux  

4. Personal Stories 

 5. Insights from the personal testimonies – Gendered experiences of childhood boarding

Linda Devereux  

6. Insights from personal testimonies: Third Culture Kids and boarding school

Linda Devereux  

7. Coming Home (a therapist’s view)

Roe Woodroffe  

8. A safe haven

Ulrika Ernvik

Critics reviews
“This well-researched book forms a welcome addition to the growing literature on the psychological fall-out from the British boarding habit. It focusses on those sent away from the warmth of overseas childhoods to abide in schools in an unknown country called ‘home’. At an incomprehensible distance from their families, their losses are equally incomprehensible.”
Nick Duffell, psychohistorian and author of The Making of Them
 
“In a rich combination of theory and moving personal testimony Moxey and Devereux have assembled narrative accounts by those sent to British boarding schools as very young girls. The plight of Third Culture Kids, whose parents were employed in military, mercantile and missionary occupations is central. This important contribution to the literature on Boarding School Syndrome conveys yet another psychological tragedy of the British Empire and the multiple losses, cruelty and abuse endured. A compelling read it will be of interest to therapists, historians and those who have suffered a similar childhood.”   
Joy Schaverien (PhD), Jungian analyst, psychotherapist and author of Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child  

 https://www.routledge.com/Exploring-Boarding-School-Challenges-for-Women-and-Third-Culture-Kids-Worlds-Away-from-Home/Moxey-Devereux/p/book/9781032876313?srsltid=AfmBOoq9XE1JwVIjK0bvCet0V4Ut-sqTYjASloJsH2ETasQClZlA2N_K

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Two papers and a book review

We are pleased to announce that the third batch of the current volume (14) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.

Added to the 2025 edition of our journal are the following three papers:
– “Writing Care: Narrative Strategies and Corporeal Realities in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House” by Angel Maria Varghese and Arka Chattopadhyay.
– “A Quartet of Diplomatic Memoirs” by Kenneth Weisbrode.

Also available now is a book review of Douglas Field’s Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me by Janina Levin.

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.

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A posting by a list member–

SHAPING A SCENE: FICTIONAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

A COMPARATIVE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE

Robert Fraser

https://roberthughfraser.substack.com/p/shaping-a-scene-fictional-and-biographical

Robert Fraser, FRSL, FRAS, FEA,

Emeritus Professor,

English and Creative Writing,

Open University.

35, Woodfield Drive,

Charlbury, OX7 3SE.

01608 810743.

https://www.open.ac.uk/people/rf226

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fraser_(writer)

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A book with many list members–and a generous discount–Life Writing as World Literature–Literatures as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic)

Life Writing as World Literature is out now with Bloomsbury!

Life Writing as World Literature: : Literatures as World Literature Helga Lenart-Cheng Bloomsbury Academic

We’re thrilled to share it with the IABA community—and you can get 35% off when you order from Bloomsbury.com. Just use the code IABA35 at checkout.

Huge thanks to everyone who supported this project along the way—your encouragement truly meant a lot!

We hope you’ll take a look, and feel free to spread the word,

Ioana Luca & Helga Lenart-Cheng

Description

A global array of contributors explore the interplay between translation and circulation, mediums and materialities, and aesthetics and politics in how life writing is shaped by and becomes world literature.

We live in the age of popular self-representation in that most people around the globe either produce or consume autobiographical material: memoirs, selfies, blogs, etc. The current volume investigates this global phenomenon and examines how life writing and world literature converge. Why do some personal stories get “picked up,” translated, circulated, and taught in classrooms, while others remain moored in local waters? Do autobiographical stories that travel widely have something in common about them? Or is it the other way around, is it our notion of “world literature” that imposes uniform expectations on these diverse texts? And what can we gain from studying these two fields in conjunction?

Life Writing as World Literature brings together experts who map regional and local autobiographical traditions from six continents. These scholars explore the dynamic interplay between local and global aesthetics and sociopolitical concerns, presenting case studies that include prison narratives from communist regimes, Japanese diaries, multilingual Caribbean memoirs, Indian auto/biographical comics, and stories by Taiwanese domestic workers.

To understand how and why some personal stories enter global dissemination, contributors inquire into translation, market mechanisms, and circulation patterns, while also exploring the affordances of new media and materialities when recording contemporary lives. Life Writing as World Literature brings a fresh perspective to both fields – world literature and life writing – opening up exciting avenues of research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Life Writing and World Literature: Introduction
Helga Lenart-Cheng, Saint Mary’s College of California, USA, and Ioana Luca, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Part I: Frames of Reading

1. Collection, Connection, Translation, Comparison: The Provocations of Life Writing as World Literature
John David Zuern, University of Hawai’i Manoa, USA

2. Auto/biographical Comics in World Literature: Gaps and Silences
Julie Rak, University of Alberta, Canada

3. Life Writing and Citational Justice in the Context of World Literature
Kim Rostan, Wofford College, USA

Part II: From Local Traditions to Global Concerns

5. An African in the World: Noni Jabavu’s Memoirs as World Literature
Athambile Masola, University of Cape Town, South Africa

6. “A Writer of the World”: Peter Abrahams’s Autobiographical Texts, South Africa, and World Literature
Marta Fossati, University of Milan, Italy

7. Rock-Star, Comedian, “Working Class Man”: Popular Memoir and Celebrity Migrant Life Writing in Contemporary Australia
Jacqui Dickin and Kylie Cardell, Flinders University, Australia

8. Caribbean Life Writing as World Literature
Natalie Edwards (University of Bristol, UK)

Part III: Institutionalization, Circulation, Translation

9. Premodern Japanese Life Writing: Canonization, Translation, Adaptation, and Worlding
Christina Laffin, University of British Columbia, Canada

10. Whose Life (Narrative) Is It Anyways? Circulation, Translation, and Unbelonging in Gina Saraceni’s Adriático and Raquel Rivas Rojas’s Inventario para después de una Guerra
Irina R. Troconis, Cornell University, USA

11. Worlding Precarious Lives: Southeast-Asian Workers in Taiwan
Joan Chiung-huei Chang, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Part IV: Life Writing: Local History and Global Memory

12. Surviving Genres: Life Writing and the Communist Carceral Experience
Oana Popescu-Sandu, University of Southern Indiana, USA

13. A Nicaraguan Woman’s Auto/biographical Resistance: Gioconda Belli and Literary [R]Evolution
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, The College of New Jersey, USA

14. Globalizing Caste: The Contemporary Dalit Feminist Memoir
Sreya Chatterjee, University of Houston, USA

Part V: Worldliness, Materialities, and Activism

15. Travel, Disease, and Life Writing as World Literature: Jack London, Audre Lorde, Gao Xingjian, Alfred Hornung
Johannes Gutenberg, University of Mainz, Germany

16. Children’s Drawings from Ukraine: Drawing Life, Drawing the World
Kate Douglas and Edith Hill, Flinders University, Australia

17. Activism and the Graphic Memoir: Between the Personal and the Political
Julia Alekseyeva, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Afterword. Life History and the Literatures of the World: Notes toward a Provocation
S. Shankar, University of Hawai’i, Manoa, USA

Reviews

“At its most measured, Life Writing as World Literature explores the challenges of enacting the transnational without reifying the nation, of advocating for the relational and collaborative without erasing individual agency, and of embracing the aesthetic while insisting on the citational. At its most ambitious, it suggests that life writing might usefully ‘blow up the very notion of World Literature.’ A valuable addition to the related projects of worlding literature and articulating lives.” ―Craig Howes, Professor of English, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA

“This timely collection comparatively and provocatively situates practices and practitioners of life writing in multiple frameworks focused on their languages, origins, genres, and themes. Contributors, attentive to the polyphonic resonances of how autobiographical narratives negotiate geographic and ideological boundaries, make a compelling case for the ‘worlding’ of life writing.” ―Julia Watson, Academy Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, USA

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The Journal of Epistolary Studies has just published its latest issue, Vol. 4 No. 1 (2025), at https://jes-ojs-utrgv.tdl.org/jes. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review all articles and items of interest.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,

Gary Schneider

Full Issue

• PDF

Articles

• Front Matter Gary Schneider1-4
  • PDF
• Two Millennia of Epistolary Editing, or Cicero’s The Letters to Atticus as 426 Decisions Linda McGuire5-17
  • PDF
• Fighting against Time: The Expression of Urgency in the Letters of Francesco Guicciardini of February 1525 to May 1526 Hélène Miesse18-31
  • PDF
• An Award Letter Too Late to Receive: Considering Sophie Germain’s Mathematical Correspondence Maria Tamboukou32-49
  • PDF
• Intertextual Temporalities in Isabella Bird’s Letters from Japan Madoka Nagado50-59
  • PDF
• “Time to die many times”: Negotiating Time in Letters between Couples during the First World War Carol Acton60-72
  • PDF

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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

www.candidarifkind.com

Hear how to pronounce my name

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

(pronunciation)

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)

nicolestamant.agnesscott.org

Agnes Scott College

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

vrademacher@babson.edu

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

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

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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

Autotheories

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

—

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:

Editorial Wounded Scholar—Healing Witness Idit Gil & Stefanie Hofer Pages: 631-637 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2427479   Essay ‘I Hope You and Your Loved Ones Remain Safe’: Dispatch from a Teacher-Scholar-Life Writer in Wartime Ilana M. Blumberg Pages: 641-657 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2409073   Articles Kinship in Darkness: On the Humanities’ Intrinsic Potential to Foster Post-Traumatic Healing Stefanie Hofer Pages: 661-674 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2409066   On the Memory of Birds: A Meditation on Memory and Mourning AIDS Deaths in South Africa Annette Wentworth Pages: 675-684 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2409077   Inventing Reality: An Integration of Autobiographical Fiction with Jungian Psychoanalysis to Negotiate a Personal Experience of Trauma | Rachel Newsome Pages: 685-694 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2409068   Between the Personal and the History: Writing a Biography in the First Person | Idit Gil Pages: 695-713 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2410337   Trauma and Healing through Postgenerational Holodomor Survivor Research | Elise Westin Pages: 715-734 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2409096   Torn Bodies: Inner Conflicts of Surviving Composers Yumi Notohara Pages: 735-753 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2424583   Scriptotherapy: WW2 Shanghai Female Refugees’ Memoirs Arleen Ionescu Pages: 755-773 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2409071   Interview On Witnessing, the Responsibility of Transmitting, and the Healing Powers of Creativity. An Interview with the Jewish-Argentine Artist Mirta Kupferminc Stefanie Hofer Pages: 775-790 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2024.2410350

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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.

https://www.routledge.com/Lebano-Pathography-Converging-Pathologies-and-Lived-Narratives-Since-August-4-2020/ElHajj/p/book/9781032740058?srsltid=AfmBOop-tgqcxIe2fP1azsfsKXIWnODLj06OazI4TL3z0qF89dfOaUdH

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

*

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

mary.stewart@bl.uk

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Considerable working knowledge and understanding of applicable federal and state laws, rules, regulations, and theories and systems associated with publishing.
4. 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.
5. Demonstrated ability to interpret and present information and ideas clearly and accurately in writing, verbally, and by preparation of reports and other materials.
6. Demonstrated ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with internal and external organizations, groups, team leaders and members, and individuals.
7. Demonstrated ability to operate a personal computer and apply word processing software, and desktop publishing software such as InDesign.
8. If applicable, for supervisory work, demonstrated ability to lead subordinates, manage work priorities and projects, and manage employee relations.
9. Demonstrated project management skills, including the ability to manage multiple publishing projects and budgets.
10. Ability to work with minimal supervision and to exercise independent professional judgment.
11. Ability to supervise and coordinate the work of others.
12. Ability to work during evenings, weekends, and/or holidays.
13. Ability to travel to national and international locations in a timely manner.

Desirable Qualifications

1. Possession of a graduate degree in a related field.
2. Subject area knowledge pertinent to life writing.
3. Editorial experience at a university press or similar organization.
4. Experience with developmental editing, copyediting, production editing, proofreading, and/or typesetting.
5. Demonstrated commitment to continuous learning.
6. Ability to keep abreast of new technology in the field.
7. Ability to create and prepare images for print, display, and electronic distribution with consideration for permissions, fair use, and other legal issues.
8. Ability to engage in digital publishing and to develop and maintain social media and WordPress website.
9. Familiarity with Adobe Acrobat, and Photoshop.
10. Proficiency with appropriate style guides, such as the MLA Handbook (9th edition) and Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition).
11. 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

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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

Download full issue in PDF

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.

https://www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/Approaches-to-Teaching-World-Literature/Approaches-to-Teaching-Jacobs-s-Incidents-in-the-Life-of-a-Slave-Girl

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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

International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide

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

CONTENTS

Transformations: A Personal History of Introducing Complicité into Academic Life and Learning Communities

by Nergis Canefe

Conversation with My Classmates: Displacement, War, and Survival

by Eva Mikuska

Listening to, Reconstructing, and Writing about Stories of Violence: A Research Journey Amidst Personal Loss

by Kristine Andra Avram

On Being Too Close to It 

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

Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing

by Maja Korac andCindy Horst

Hosts, Again: From Conditional Inclusion and Liberal Censorship to Togetherness and Creative/Critical Refugee Epistemologies

by Saida Hodžić

Lost in Translation? Agency and Incommensurability in the Transnational Travelling of Discourses of Sexualized Harm

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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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