Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

About

For four decades, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly has explored the theoretical, generic, historical, cultural, and practical dimensions of life writing. Once a year, a formal, guest-edited special issue explores a topic of emerging critical interest, including most recently Graphic Medicine, guest edited by Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti. Biography also publishes insightful reviews and an annual bibliography of works about life writing. Our newest feature, the International Year in Review, invites contributors from around the world to produce concise essays on some of the most influential publications in biography, autobiography, memoir, and other forms of life writing, offering personal perspectives on global trends in the field.

Submission Guidelines

Unsolicited submissions to Biography are welcome. Texts should be double-spaced and approximately 2,500 to 9,500 words in length, including works cited lists and endnotes. Biography is now using the eighth edition of the Modern Language Association (MLA) reference and works cited system. Authors are welcome to submit their essays to Biography following MLA’s guidelines, or they can use another style and reference system with which they are more comfortable. Please include a 50-word abstract and a biographical note of one or two sentences. All copyrights are held by the Biographical Research Center unless other arrangements are agreed upon.

Biography follows a policy of double-anonymous submissions. Authors should email their essays to biograph@hawaii.edu without their names appearing anywhere on or in the document. Until a final decision is reached, the identity of the author will not be revealed to outside readers or our acquisition editors.

If you are unable to anonymize your work without significantly interfering with your argument, please include in a cover note to the managing editor with your submission a message stating that anonymizing your text was not possible. We will not be able to conduct double-anonymous peer review for your text under these circumstances, but the managing editor will maintain a single-anonymous review, where the names of your text’s readers will be protected.

Biography does not consider simultaneous submissions. Submissions sent to Biography should not be under consideration by any other publisher. Because we ask you to wait until we have made a decision about your piece, we aim to send final decisions to authors within four months from the original submission date. We also ask that authors send us a single submission at a time.

Inquiries are welcome. Send all editorial correspondence to Biography at biograph@hawaii.edu. Please address questions about book reviews to our Book Review Editor at gabiog@hawaii.edu.

Copyright and Republication

Copyright to essays and reviews appearing in Biography are held by the Biographical Research Center, unless otherwise stated. Authors are free to post and/or republish their individual pieces in their institutional repositories or other publications as they see fit. We ask that authors ensure that Biography is credited as the first publisher, and that authors let us at Biography know about their republications.

Biography only obtains permission to publish images in its own print and online formats. Republication of articles with images will require the author to seek out formal permission to republish these images.