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Biography is a form of history writing that, while immensely popular, is continually contested. It is, on the one hand, regularly denigrated as being too focused on famous historical actors, or as artificially locating meaning in disparate or coincidental life events to produce a coherent narrative. On the other hand, numerous historians are eager to explore new forms of biography, seeing in it the ability to give texture to historical events through the specificity of a particular individual’s life trajectory. In particular, scholars who study previously marginalized subjects identify biography as a form that can open up discussion about on-the-ground experiences that a historical subject faces when navigating the challenges of modernity, such as migration, political oppression, social erasure, etc. While a biography cannot tell us everything about a particular place or time, “no one ‘invents’ a self apart from cultural notions available to them in a particular historical setting” (Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography). Therefore biography can illuminate otherwise obscured facets of a historical time.
I seek papers on the topic of biography for a proposal for the Modernist Studies Association annual conference to be held October 18-21 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Of particular interest is the ways that literary, visual, and other cultural historians theorize and/or employ biography to study historical actors negotiating modern life. What does biography allow or offer that would not emerge in other kinds of history writing? How do writers of biography avoid the pitfalls of fabricating a coherent narrative where none exists? What other issues are raised in the use of biography?
Please send a 250-word abstract and a current cv to me via e-mail by March 30, 2102.
Rachel Schreiber
Associate Professor and Director of Humanities & Sciences
California College of the Arts
Oakland, California
rschreiber@cca.edu
For more information on the conference, see:
http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa14/
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