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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We are pleased to announce that the fourth batch of the current volume (13) of the European Journal of Life Writing is now online.

Added to the 2024 edition of our journal are the following three papers:
– “Living on a Picture: Approaching Images and Life Stories in Social Media” by Ana Isabel Galván García de las Bayonas.
– “A Feminist Autoethnography of a Family Archive: Affects, Narratives and Practices During Two World Crises: World War II and Covid-19” by Sonia Yuruen Lerma Mayer.
– “Writing the Lone Mother’s Lifetime: Peter Handberg’s Den vita fläcken” by Helena Wahlström Henriksson.

Also available now is a review of Amy Carlson’s Reading Mediated Life Narratives: Auto/Biographical Agency in the Book, Museum, Social Media, and Archives by Iana Nikitenko.

More publications will follow throughout the coming months.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar

Visit our website to read the full announcement.

This message is sent to you on behalf of European Journal of Life Writing.
https://ejlw.eu

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‘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