Lives & Letters Mailing: February/March 2017
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
2. Book announcement: Biography, gender and history: Nordic perspectives
3. A book by list members–“Life Writing in the Long Run,” a new collection by Smith & Watson
4. Convention and Revolution–Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s (4/30/2017; 11/29-12/1/2017) Warsaw, Poland
5. Narrative works: special issue: NARRATIVE ACROSS DISCIPLINES
6. Call for Papers for the international Workshop “Doing Science – Doing Excellence – Doing Inequalities? Interrogating the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia”, 08-10 November 2017, Bochum (Germany)
7. Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature and Popular Culture (University College Dublin, Oct-2017)
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are a number of new features on the Whites Writing Whiteness website. For instance, a number of new blogs are now available – including a range of discussions concerning over-time developing thoughts about Soweto as well as several interesting bits from the Forbes Collections. In addition, a number of new Traces have been completed and will appear over the next few weeks, there is much new information about the archives and collections worked on, and new contributions have been made to other parts of WWW webpages as well.
We aren’t individually listing all of the new things added to the website here, because we are working up to the publication and launch of the dataset that is the heart of the research and which will appear, in a similar way to the Olive Schreiner Letters Online, on a purpose-designed website at HRIOnline, the UK’s leading publisher of primary research materials in the arts, humanities and social sciences. This will be in April.
Do visit all your favourite pages on the WWW website to find the new material that has been posted. For instance, read all about the collections worked on at: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thehub/collections-and-archives/collections/
In addition, please stay tuned for all the exciting project developments to come!
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2. Book announcement: Biography, gender and history: Nordic perspectives
Eds. Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Birgitte Possing
New publication on biography and history by the book series Cultural history – Kulttuurihistoria at the University of Turku: http://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/hum/yksikot/kulttuurihistoria/tutkimus/culturalhistory/Sivut/home.aspx
How to construct a life of a nineteenth-century Icelandic ordinary woman? What perspectives does surveillance material open up when exploring an individual? How to use portraits as biographical clues? What do group biographies or pair biographies add to the genre of historical biography?
This book, with contributions by scholars from various Nordic countries, reflects the biographical turn that has influenced Nordic historical research during the past few decades. It is a contribution to the growing international interest in, and theorisation of, biography and biographical research as a method of doing history. The individual chapters focus on challenges of gender, context, and relationality in biographical research, and develop the methodologies of biographical research further.
‘This is an excellent volume covering a significant gap in the interdisciplinary field of historical and biographical writing not only in the Nordic milieu but more widely; it does so from a rich range of perspectives, theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as biographical case studies. It is indeed a rare contribution in the life-writing literature.‘ – Professor Maria Tamboukou (University of East London)
Contact person:
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Maarit.leskela@utu.fi
Book orders: https://utushop.utu.fi/p/1900-biography-gender-and-history-nordic-perspectives/
Biography, gender and history: Nordic perspectives
Eds. Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Birgitte Possing
Contents of the book
Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
Doing biography
I GENRE
Birgitte Possing
How does one relate a complex life? Reflections on a polyphonic portrait of the minister and intellectual Bodil Koch (1903–1973)
Christina Carlsson Wetterberg
Biography as a way of challenging gender stereotypes: Reflections on writing about the Swedish author and feminist Frida Stéenhoff (1865–1945)
II GENDER
Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir
A biography of her own: The historical narrative and Sigrí.ur Pálsdóttir (1809–1871)
Antti Harmainen
Group biography as an approach to studying manhood and religion in late nineteenth-century Finland
Kristine Kjærsgaard
Love and emotions in the diplomatic world: the relationship between Bodil Begtrup’s public and private lives, 1937–1956
III CONTEXT
Tiina Kinnunen
‘Fighting sisters’: A comparative biography of Ellen Key (1849–1926) and Alexandra Gripenberg (1857–1913) in the contested field of European feminisms
Irene Andersson
Telling stories of gendered space and place: the political agency of the Swedish communist Valborg Svensson (1903–1983)
IV RELATIONS
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
Remembering mother: Relations and memory in the biographical project on Minna Krohn (1841–1917)
Heini Hakosalo
Coming together: early Finnish medical women and the multiple levels of historical biography
Kaisa Vehkalahti
Bad girl biographies: Child welfare documents as gendered biographies
Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Birgitte Possing
Afterword: Future challenges
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3. A book by list members–“Life Writing in the Long Run,” a new collection by Smith & Watson
Life Writing in the Long Run
A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
This book gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (TOC below) written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century.
It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital life writing, genealogy, graphic memoir, human rights witnessing, manifesto; and essays engaging the key concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality, relationality, and visuality.
This collection captures decades of exciting developments in the field, making it indispensable reading for courses on modes and media of self-presentation in cultural, gender, and literary studies and feminist theory.
You can order this book through Amazon or in your local bookstore. To read it for free online, visit: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9739969
ISBN: 978-1-60785-409-8 (Paperback, $39.99) 978-1-60785-410-4 (eBook, $19.99)
Michigan Publishing Services
ADVANCE REVIEWS
Both as remarkable individuals, and as the most high- powered and influential team in life writing, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have been defining and moving the field forward for decades. If their landmark volume Reading Autobiography is the owner’s manual for autobiography studies, Life Writing in the Long Run serves the same function for their remarkable achievements as theorists, critics, and editors. An absolutely indispensable collection for present and future scholars, and a monument to the most consistently productive, innovative, and generous scholars I know.
—Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research; Co-Editor, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Many of these essays have entered the lexicon of criticism in the field of life narrative: the rumpled bed of autobiography, the metrics of authenticity. Smith and Watson are an assemblage, a generative force that has always been slightly ahead of the curve: setting the pace, with a practical bent for toolkits and maps, a prescient sense of getting a life and de/colonizing the subject and, in the long run, an enduring passion for the pleasures of life narrative.
—Gillian Whitlock, Professor, University of Queensland
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments and Permissions xi
A Personal Introduction to Life Writing in the Long Run xvii
Part I: Theoretical Frameworks
1 Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices, from Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998) 3
2 The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions (2001) 89
3 Witness or False Witness? Metrics of Authenticity, I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in Testimony (2012) 111
Part II: Everyday Lives and Autobiographical Storytelling
4 Introduction to Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996) 165
5 Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree (Watson 1996) 191
6 Virtually Me: A Toolkit about Online Self-Presentation (2014) 225
Part III: Enabling Concepts
7 Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance (Smith 1995) 261
8 The Spaces of Autobiographical Narrative (Watson 2007) 283
9 The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities, Politics (Smith 1991) Print and e-book only 305
Part IV: Visualized Lives
10 Introduction: Mapping Women’s Self-Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces, from Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002) 345
11 Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Watson 2008) 393
12 Re-citing, Re-siting, and Re-sighting Likeness: Reading the Family Archive in Drucilla Modjeska’s Poppy and Sally Morgan’s My Place (Smith 1994) 435
13 Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks (Smith 2011) 467
Part V: Women’s Life Writing in the United States
14 Introduction: Living in Public, from Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919 (2006) 485
15 Cheesecake, Nymphs, and ‘We the People’: About 1900 in America (Smith 1994) Print and e-book only 517
16 Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates: The Metrics of Authenticity in When I Was Puerto Rican (Watson 2013) Print and e-book only 545
17 ‘America’s Exhibit A’: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Political Authenticity (Smith 2012) 577
Part VI: Global Circuits, Political Formations
18 “Introduction: De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” from De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (1992) 605
19 Memory, Narrative, and the Discourses of Identity
in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven (Smith 1999) 629
20 Narratives and Rights: Zlata’s Diary and the Circulation of Stories of Suffering Ethnicity (Smith 2006) 657
21 Parsua Bashi’s Nylon Road: The Visual Dialogics of Witnessing in Iranian Women’s Graphic Memoir (Watson 2016) 681
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. Convention and Revolution–Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s (4/30/2017; 11/29-12/1/2017) Warsaw, Poland
On behalf of Organizing Committee, I would like to invite researchers of life writing, herstory, (oral) history to participate in the international conference CONVENTION AND REVOLUTION. Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s: archives, critiques and methods, to be held in Warsaw on 29 November– 1 December 2017, organized by the team behind the Women’s Archive, a division of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
The conference will focus on discussing the latest methods of working with women’s personal documents and biographies written on their basis. We are interested in strategies developed in contemporary historiography and literature studies, in particular interdisciplinary women’s, gender and queer studies. As for historical periods, we are interested mainly in the 1800s and the 1900s up to World War II.
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Long hours in the archives. Raise your hand if you have never yawned over letters of journals written by women of the centuries past. (No hands go up.) The thoughts creep in: this is so boring, so conventional, so predictable – and there’s another pile of pages to read…Fighting sleep, we still entertain hopes of revolutionary finds, fantastic rebel women, unknown facts about those who gained fame, controversies hidden among the yellowing pages. Yet in adopting this attitude, we are missing out on a far greater point. The very gesture of writing, when made by a woman, constitutes rebellion, and the conventionality of the text should not obscure this fact. Anachronism is the greatest power of any revolution. Many women, locked (quite literally) in their homes, using a narrative that mirrored what they had learnt, dreamt of freedom for themselves and others, whether that were aware of it or not. When they sat down to write, they created a moment just for themselves, and in doing so, they carved out a space of their own freedom – small at first, but gradually expanding – where they created themselves. They wrote themselves. With time, they became the subject of writing by other women, their biographers. Discovering, documenting and researching this chain of women’s lives suddenly no longer seems boring.
The international conference, scheduled to take place over three days, will focus on discussing the latest methods of working with women’s personal documents, biographies and letters written on their basis. We are interested in strategies developed in contemporary historiography and literature studies, in particular interdisciplinary women’s, gender and queer studies. We also have a strong interest in the experiences of researchers of herstory, oral history, and life writing. As for historical periods, we are interested mainly in the 1800s and the 1900s up to World War II.
However, the true chronology will emerge out of the documents themselves. We have decided to focus on journals, letters, diaries and autobiographies of women in that period because it is, in our opinion, unique: this is when among Western elites the discourse of women’s emancipation was articulated and started gaining popularity. Most women at the time responded with great reserve and even hostility, choosing instead to support the traditional understanding of gender roles.
Personal documents written by women in the 19th century are an excellent reflection of the ambivalence of their authors towards emancipation. Since the 1980s, many scholarly papers have been written to demonstrate that these texts, while ostensibly fitting with the conventions of gender representation, in fact undermine the traditional gender roles. Submission and its subversion, conservative attitudes and emancipation (if not overt, then expressed through a variety of strategies to promote empowerment and women’s agency) – they meet, often in surprising ways, in these conventionalized, seemingly uninteresting practices of women’s life writing.
Using the existing findings in the area of gender studies as a starting point, during the conference we will give the floor to researchers who will present other possibilities for reading women’s personal writings, and reveal how we can access what often remains hidden under the surface of the texts which require a critical, contextualized reading. Together, we will discuss the interpretations that facilitate finding the seeds of rebellion and social revolution, while seemingly adhering to patriarchal norms (including formal and literary conventions).
On the first day the conference, we will focus on novel, critical approaches to reading journals, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies written by women. We will discuss what survival strategies were reflected in women’s life writing, what this writing offered to its authors, what purposes it served, and how it influenced the next generations of its female readers.
On the second the conference, we will investigate women’s biographic writing. How can archives be used to write biographies of 19th century women? What are the most interesting projects in this area, and what outcomes have they produced so far? What challenges are to be expected in this type of work?
On the third day the conference, we will look at the possibilities that the instruments of digital humanities offer in archiving and digitally editing women’s life writing. Can digital archives and databases restore the memory of the women that have been forgotten, or is the opposite true – are they just a digital reinforcement of the traditional divisions and power (im)balances? We will discuss the most exciting projects, the new research tools, and the opportunities they offer.
During the conference key-note lectures will be delivered by such researchers as, Prof. Sidonie Smith and Prof. Julia Watson, authors and editors of the groundbreaking book entitled “De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography”, Prof. Cynthia Huff, author of many articles focused on women’s diaries and author of descriptive bibliographies of nineteenth-century women’s diaries, Prof. Andrea Pető, author of a biography of Júlia Rajk and author of books on women in Hungarian politics between 1945-1951 and the female perpetrators in Hungary during World War II. The Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson lecture will be followed by a seminar devoted to their new book of essays, which will be published in early 2017.
The conference is organized by the team behind the Women’s Archive, a division of the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences (www.ibl.waw.pl) now engaged in a long-term project The Women’s Archive: writing (Archiwum kobiet: piszące). Co-organizers are the Digital Humanities Laboratory, University of Warsaw (www.lach.edu.pl) and the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (www.ispan.waw.pl).
The Conference “Convention and revolution. Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s: archives, critiques and methods” will take place at Staszic Palace in Warsaw, Poland November 27-December 1, 2017.
Conference fee for regular participants: 400 PLN/100 EUR
Conference fee for young scholars and PhD students: 200 PLN/50 EUR
Paper submissions please send till April 30, 2017 on email address:
convention_and_revolution2017@ibl.waw.pl
The application deadline is 30 April 2017.
Sincerely,
Ewa Serafin-Prusator
Organizing Committee
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. Narrative works: special issue: NARRATIVE ACROSS DISCIPLINES
NARRATIVE WORKS: ISSUES, INVESTIGATIONS & INTERVENTIONS
CURRENT ISSUE
Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2016)
SPECIAL ISSUE: NARRATIVE ACROSS DISCIPLINES
Introduction to Special Issue: Narrative Across Disciplines (Invited)
Clive Baldwin
Articles
At the Intersections of Narrative Inquiry and Professional Education (Invited) Andrew Estefan, Vera Caine, D. Jean Clandinin
Narrative and Sociology (Invited)
Matti Hyvärinen
Narrative Gerontology: Countering the Master Narratives of Aging (Invited) Kate de Medeiros
Exploring the Possible: Philosophical Reflection, Historical Imagination, and Narrative Agency (Invited)
Hanna Meretoja
Narrative Works in History (Invited)
Alun Munslow
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6. Call for Papers for the international Workshop “Doing Science – Doing Excellence – Doing Inequalities? Interrogating the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia”, 08-10 November 2017, Bochum (Germany)
Call for Papers
Doing Science – Doing Excellence – Doing Inequalities? Interrogating the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia
International Workshop of the Chair of Sociology/Social Inequality and Gender with the Marie Jahoda Visiting Professor Program in International Gender Studies
Ruhr University Bochum (Germany), 08–10 November 2017
New Public Management and new forms of governance have dominated the agendas for higher education reform in many countries for several years. Neoliberalism and the idea of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ have produced a shift in the way scientific knowledge, universities and ‘ideal researchers’ are defined. One important strategy of the latest state-run programs focussed the stimulation of competition between individuals and organisations through funding of the so-called ‘excellence’. From this it followed that ‘excellence’ became an idealised goal for scientific subjects as well as for research-processes and organisation development. It seems like everyone in scientific organisation(s) wants to be or become excellent, and therefore scientific organisations engage in improving their organisational excellence with different strategies and measures. Along with that, contemporary universities and researchers need now an authentic profile, foresighted planning and measurable outputs to emerge as excellent. Entangled with that, ongoing requests to be visible, enterprising and creative can also be observed on all levels and functions in academia. Though the associated discourses of ‘excellence’ seem to get out of hand, as evidenced by mission statements even in provincial universities and new competitive funding models.
At first sight an excellence explosion seems to be taking place: noisy, colourful and promoting the renaissance of meritocratic ideas. However, ideas of excellence have governed science for a long time and thus are not really new in scientific organisation(s). In the light of New Public Management and the new academic governance they seem to be reformulated and produce a paradox situation. On the one hand, embedded in the discourse on scientific excellence and the entrepreneurial university, a strengthening of multiple inequalities between individuals and organisations seems to take place. On the other hand, the discourse on scientific excellence and the entrepreneurial university is accompanied by ongoing reforms to promote gender equality and diversity in scientific organisation(s).
Even though all these developments are allegedly gendered and have implications for gender relations in academia, little explicit attention in science and/or gender studies is paid to a critical analysis of the concept(s) of excellence in scientific knowledge production and scientific organisation(s). What is ongoing in academia with respect to scientific knowledge production, excellence and inequalities? What are the implications and effects of these new formations of power/knowledge in the higher education system, locally and globally? Are there signs for a gendered excellence? Which theories and methodologies are helpful for analysing this paradoxical situation? The international and interdisciplinary research workshop aims at focusing on these questions from a critical perspective which is informed by gender and intersectionality. Special attention will also be paid to disciplinary comparisons and different geopolitical contexts.
We welcome offers of both theoretical and empirical academic papers, in particular those concerning the following themes and related questions:
• Scientific knowledge production: How do research funding policies contribute to the construction of excellent scientific knowledge and to the meritocratic ideal of scientific knowledge production? How are idea(l)s of ‘excellence’ linked to specific academic work regimes, a specific (and transformed) organisation-culture as well as to different scientific disciplines? How is ‘excellence’ constructed? Which criteria are taken into account in order to measure excellent scientific knowledge? What makes it possible to recognise excellent scientific achievements? Which role do e.g. internationality and inter- or transdisciplinary play? How and by whom is excellent scientific knowledge production done? Does excellent scientific knowledge production require special methodologies and organisational forms and if so which and why? What counts as excellent scientific knowledge? Are some scientific disciplines more excellent than others, and why? What is the meaning of gender, also in combination with other inequalities, in excellent knowledge production and delivering process? Are thereby new differentiations between ‘normal’ research and ‘excellent’ research emerging?
• Scientific organisation(s): What role do politics of gender equality and diversity play in the construction of excellent scientific organisation(s)? To what extend do excellence and equality policies go hand in hand in scientific organisation(s) and to what extend do they differ, and why? Which organisational practices are considered to contribute to excellent and/or gender equal scientific organisation(s)? Are there special criteria that characterise excellent scientific organisation(s)? How is the excellence of scientific organisation(s) measured? How far are these measurements informed by gender and diversity? Which equity issues evolve along with ideas and practices of shaping an ‘excellent’ university?
• Recruitment practices of scientific personnel: How is scientific excellence constructed in recruitment procedures, e.g. of doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and/or professors? Which ideas of an excellent ‘ideal researcher’ do emerge in scientific personnel recruitment? Which criteria are taken into account to measure scientific performance, and how do these criteria contribute to reproduce inequalities? How do excellence assessments in personnel recruitment procedures contribute to renew or change meritocratic ideas of scientific knowledge production? How can individual scientific excellence be developed? What role do criteria like gender and other inequalities such as age, class and race play in the recruitment of scientific personnel?
Both junior and senior scientists are invited to submit an abstract (between 500 and 800 words on the topic, objectives and research questions plus, if applicable, the empirical background of the paper) in form of a word- or pdf-document. Abstracts should also include FULL contact details, including your name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. Abstracts should be sent until March 31st, 2017 to Heike Kahlert (conference-sozsug@rub.de), see for more information about the organising chair http://www.sowi.rub.de/sozsug/index.html.en). Deadline for notice of acceptance/ rejection of the paper is May 15th, 2017.
The workshop is an opportunity to discuss ‘work in progress’ and research results as well as to form networks for further international collaborations. Therefore, admitted papers will be discussed in small working groups which will work together throughout the whole workshop. The papers (with a maximum length of 7.000 words) will be due on September 01st, 2017, and will be delivered to all participants of the workshop. All participants are expected to read the papers in advance. During the workshop the authors will introduce their papers briefly, and each participant will comment on one paper. Selected papers will be published.
!Note: We apologise for the fact that no funding, fee waiver, travel or other bursaries can be offered for attending the workshop! The workshop fee (appr. 100 €) will cover conference material and catering during coffee and lunch breaks.
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7. Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature and Popular Culture (University College Dublin, Oct-2017)
Proposal Deadline: 1 April 2017, midnight Dublin time.
Notifications by 1 May 2017
Conference: October 13-14th, 2017, University College Dublin
This conference will explore the last 200 years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in relation to aesthetics and form, race, sexuality, class, space, reproduction and the family, political movements, and labor.
Independent women —singly blessed, new, surplus, or adrift— have remained a center around which anxieties and excitement coalesce. A range of historians, demographers, and literary scholars have focused on the social and political significance of diverse single women in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between chastity and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus.
In recent years, especially in relation to UK and US elections, there has been an explosion of popular interest in contemporary singleness. Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry and All the Single Ladies, comedian Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance, Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo, the Washington Post’s “Solo-ish” column, as well as the work of psychologist and single-rights activist Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored but Still Live Happily Ever After, all explore what it means to be a socially, politically, and sexually active single person in the 21st century. News outlets, film, television, and a host of social and marketing media have demonstrated that people are fascinated by the changing status of singles.
Singleness Studies has emerged as an academic field over the last two decades but has rarely had its own forum for collaboration and exchange. This conference will bring together multiple disciplinary perspectives to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the “singly blessed” women and “bachelor girls” of the 19th and early-20th century and “all the single ladies” of the contemporary moment. We seek proposals that analyze single lives within or across this time frame, from disciplines including literature, media studies, history, geography, sociology, architecture, political science, and more. Papers and full panels that create new perspectives by crossing boundaries and integrating multiple disciplines are especially welcome.
Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Traister
Rebecca Traister is the author of the best-selling All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, a New York Times Notable Book of 2016. Traister, a National Magazine Award finalist and winner of the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, is writer-at-large for New York Magazine, where she covers politics, media and culture from a feminist perspective. She has also written for The New Republic, Salon, Elle, The Nation, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her book Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. She lives in New York City.
Possible topics include
• Representation of singles in literature
• Representation of singles in film, television, and other digital media
• Narrative form
• Space and architecture
• Demographic change
• Reproductive rights and family structures
• Reproduction and temporality
• Independent women’s labor and political work
• “Women adrift” and crisis narratives
• Singleness and race, class, or identity politics
• Queer singleness
• Familiar Figures: bachelor girls, spinsters, new women, and single ladies
• The single and the state
• Singleness and literary or media genre
• Conservative and radical independence
• Singleness in Trump’s America
• Single activism
• Comparative singleness
Scholars from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.
Full Panel Proposals: Panel coordinators should submit a 200-word rationale for the panel as whole. For each contributor, please submit a 250-word abstract, a short bio, and contact information. Panels that include diverse panelists with a range of affiliations, career experiences, and disciplinary homes are strongly encouraged. Panels should include 4 papers. Submissions can be emailed as a Word document to singlelives2017@gmail.com.
Individual Papers: Individuals submitting paper proposals should provide an abstract of 250 words, a short bio, and contact information. Submissions can be emailed as a Word document to: singlelives2017@gmail.com.
Conference Statement: We hope to host a diverse, welcoming, open first Single Lives conference. We understand diversity to include attendees as well as academic subject, approach, and field. We welcome comparative projects, though because of its smaller scale, this conference will be conducted in English.
Please direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to: singlelives2017@gmail.com
For up to date conference details, see our website: https://singlelives2017.wordpress.com/
Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Single-Lives-2017-Conference-1262119710546609/
Follow us on Twitter: @SingleLives2017
Conference Sponsors
College of Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin
Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
Contact Info:
Katherine Fama
Jorie Lagerwey
School of English, Drama, and Film
University College Dublin
Ireland
Contact Email: singlelives2017@gmail.com
URL: http://singlelives2017.wordpress.com
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 10 March 2017
