Keynotes and Special Panels

Timothy Dow Adams

Wednesday, June 25 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Kinds of Language, Kinds of Writing
Copanelists: Monika Boehringer, Paul John Eakin, and Yvonne Murphy

Timothy Dow Adams, Professor of English at West Virginia University, is the author of Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography and Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography, both from the University of North Carolina Press. He is Associate Editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Noelani M. Arista

Tuesday, June 24 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Cross Cultures, Cross Purposes?
Copanelists: Margaretta Jolly, Sidonie Smith, Zhao Baisheng

Noelani M. Arista is Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She holds an MA in Religion, and is currently completing her doctorate at Brandeis University. She is the recipient of the inaugural Mellon-Hawai‘i Doctoral Fellowship for Native Hawaiian Scholars, 08–09. She is a kanaka maoli historian of Hawaiian politics, religion, and culture, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century, and recently provided the Foreward for the republication of Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii for the Bishop Museum Press.

Mary Besemeres

Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Bella Brodzki, Manuela Costantino, and Julia Watson

Mary Besemeres is Research Associate in the School of Language Studies, Australian National University, where she holds an ARC “Discovery” grant to research Anglophone cross-cultural travel writing. She is co-editor of the journal Life Writing, and author of Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross- Cultural Autobiography (Peter Lang 2002), and articles including “Anglos Abroad: Memoirs of Immersion in a Foreign Language,” Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005: 27–42). Most recently, she coedited with Anna Wierzbicka Translating Lives: Living with Two Languages and Cultures (U of Queensland P, 2007).

Monika Boehringer

Wednesday, June 25 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Kinds of Language, Kinds of Writing
Copanelists: Timothy Dow Adams, Paul John Eakin, and Yvonne Murphy

Monika Boehringer is Associate Professor of French at Mount Allison University (Sackville, N.B., Canada), She has published numerous articles on women’s (auto)biographical writing (e.g., by M. Duras, A. Ernaux, A. Maillet, F. Daigle, D. Léger) in North-American and European journals. With grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, she has created the website “Acadian Women’s (Life) Writing” (www.mta.ca/awlw) with entries on more than 80 authors, and is preparing a critical edition of the first three texts by the acclaimed Acadian author France Daigle, on whom she is also finishing a monograph. She is currently organising a conference on literary and pictorial identity constructions in Acadie and Québec that will take place in October 2008 (www.mta.ca/aplaqa).

Bella Brodzki

Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Mary Besemeres, Manuela Costantino, and Julia Watson

Bella Brodzki is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She is coeditor (with Celeste Schenck) of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (Cornell, 1988), and author of Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (Stanford, 2007).

Manuela Costantino

Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Mary Besemeres, Bella Brodzki, and Julia Watson

Manuela Costantino teaches in the Department of English and Coordinated Arts Program at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in Translation Studies and transcultural autobiography, and has published on Canadian migrant autobiography and life narratives from/about the Middle East.

G. Thomas Couser

Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: Susanna Egan, Leigh Gilmore, Alfred Hornung, and Gillian Whitlock

G. Thomas Couser is Professor of English and Director of Disability Studies at Hofstra University. His books include Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) and Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2203). His work has been assigned in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States in courses in American studies, rhetoric, deaf studies, political science, women’s studies, and disability studies.

Paul John Eakin

Wednesday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Kinds of Language, Kinds of Writing
Copanelists: Timothy Dow Adams, Monika Boehringer, and Yvonne Murphy

Paul John Eakin has written several books on autobiography. Next fall Cornell University Press will publish his new book, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Eakin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University.

Susanna Egan

Monday, June 23 • 10:30–11:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Panel Chair: Beyond the Autobiographical Pact: New Approaches to the Work of Philippe Lejeune
Copanelists: Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak

Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser, Leigh Gilmore, Alfred Hornung, and Gillian Whitlock

Susanna Egan has recently retired from the English department at the University of British Columbia. A founding member of the IABA, she is the author of Patterns of Experience in Autobiography and Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. She has co-edited special issues of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Canadian Literature on aspects of autobiography. Special interests over the years include Holocaust literature, immigrant and minority literatures, various genres of autobiography, and autothanatography.

Leigh Gilmore

Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser, Susanna Egan, Alfred Hornung, and Gillian Whitlock

Leigh Gilmore is the author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001) and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Autobiography (1994), and coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994). Her essays are in American Imago, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Fourth Genre, Genre, Genders, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Prose Studies, and Signs. She is the Dorothy Cruikshank Backstrand Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at Scripps College.

Barbara Harlow

Thursday, June 26 • 9:00–10:15 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Address: “Tortured Thoughts: The Example Set by Ruth First from Her Interrogation in 1963 to Her Assassination in 1982”

Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin with courtesy appointments in/affiliations with Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, Asian Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. She has also taught at the American University in Cairo (1977-83 and again in 2006-7 as Visiting Professor and Chair of English and Comparative Literature), University College Galway (1992), University of Minnesota Twin Cities (1994), University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (1998) and University of Natal in Durban (2002). She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire: Vol 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Vol 11, The Scramble for Africa (2003). She is currently working on an intellectual biography of the South African activist, Ruth First. Her teaching and research interests include “imperialism and orientalism” and “literature and human rights/social justice.”

For more on Barbara Harlow and her current work:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/english/faculty/profiles/Harlow/Barbara/

Alfred Hornung

Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser, Susanna Egan, Leigh Gilmore, and Gillian Whitlock

Alfred Hornung is Professor and Chair of English and American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universit¨at Mainz. He previously taught at the Universities of W¨urzburg, Bamberg, and Erlangen, and various American and Canadian universities. He was a fellow at Harvard, Yale, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His publications are in the field of modernism, postmodernism, autobiography, postcolonialism, and intercultural studies: Narrative Struktur und Textsortendiffferenzierung: Die Texte des Muckraking Movement 1902–1912 (1979), Kulturkrise und ihre literarissche Bew¨altigung: Die Funktion der autobiographischen Struktur in Amerika vom Puritanismus zur Postmoderne (1985), and Lexikon Amerikanische Literatur (1991), twelve volumes on postmodernism, interculturality, and autobiography. From 1991–2002 he was general editor of the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies. He served as president of MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas, 2000–2004), and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies and Vice Dean of Philosophy and Philology at Mainz. He organized the IABA conference at Mainz in 2006, and edited the conference volume Autobiography and Mediation, forthcoming from Winter Verlag (Heidelberg).

Margaretta Jolly

Tuesday, June 24 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Cross Cultures, Cross Purposes?
Copanelists: Noelani Arista, Sidonie Smith, and Zhao Baisheng

Margaretta Jolly is a cultural critic with a particular interest in life writing and life history. She is author of In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (Columbia, 2008) and editor of The Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Routledge, 2001) and Dear Laughing Motorbyke: Letters from Women Welders of the Second World War (Scarlet, 1997). She is joint Director of the University of Sussex’s Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research.

Philippe Lejeune

Monday, June 23 • 9:00–10:15 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Address: “Le moi est-il international?”

Philippe Lejeune is the leading European critic and theorist of autobiography, and arguably the pre-eminent life writing theorist in the world. His landmark essay “The Autobiographical Pact” has shaped life writing studies for over thirty years, and his many books and essays have repeatedly set the direction for whole areas of autobiography scholarship. To cite only one of many examples, “Cher Écran . . . ” Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet (2000) was the first book-length study of online diaries, making him the first theorist of the blogosphere. His approach to autobiography is rigorously theoretical, and it makes a bold case for autobiography as a privileged source for the understanding of social and cultural history. Lejeune’s range of subject matter is unusually wide, taking in classical masterworks, popular literature, how-to manuals, the painted self-portrait, and oral as well as written narratives. Lejeune is also an engaging and entertaining writer. According to Michael Riffaterre, “Lejeune’s work on autobiography is the most original, powerful, effective approach to a difficult subject . . . . His style is very personal, lively. It grabs the reader as scholarship rarely does. Lejeune’s erudition and methodology are impeccable. With Genette and Greimas, he is among the most representative practitioners of narratology in France.”

Lejeune has also been a major force for the preservation and study of the diaries and journals of “those who do not write.” He was also the founder in 1992 of the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique (APA), the Association for Autobiography and the autobiographical heritage. This organization is devoted to the preservation and study of diaries and journals in France; it has since expanded to other locations in Europe. Lejeune is the editor of La Faute à Rousseau the official journal of APA, and a source of information about the activities of the various branches of the organization.

For more on Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique (APA):

Yvonne Murphy

Wednesday, June 25 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Kinds of Language, Kinds of Writing
Copanelists: Monika Boehringer, Paul John Eakin, and Yvonne Murphy

Yvonne Murphy has been Librarian of the Nothern Ireland Political Collection at the Linen Hall Library since 1995. As curator of this collection, she created and was Project Manager for “Troubled Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict,” a traveling, international exhibition that drew upon the Linen Hall holdings and toured throughout North America and South Africa. As coeditor of the Troubled Images cd-rom and book, she was awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for 2003, and was runner up in the 2002 CILIP Awards for outstanding electronic works of reference in the United Kingdom. She has served as a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, and participated as a fellow in the Salzburg Seminar on Managing Change: Libraries in the Twenty-First Century. In addition to her work with the Political Collection, Ms. Murphy is also responsible for initiating a major development campaign for the Linen Hall (http://www.linenhall.com)

Alicia Partnoy

Tuesday, June 24 • 9:00–10:15 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Address: “Disclaimer intraducible: My life / is based / on a real story”

Alicia Partnoy is a survivor from the secret detention camps where about 30,000 Argentineans “disappeared.” She is the author of The Little School. Tales of Disappearance and Survival, and of the poetry collections Little Low Flying/Volando bajito, and Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la manzana. Partnoy edited You Can’t Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile, and from 2003 to 2006, she was the co-editor of Chicana/Latina Studies: The journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. A former Vice-Chair of Amnesty International, Partnoy is an associate professor and the Chair of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Loyola Marymount University. After twenty years of circulation in English, the original manuscript of her tales about being disappeared in Argentina has just been published in her country as La Escuelita-Relatos testimoniales. Partnoy presides over Proyecto VOS-Voices of Survivors, an organization that brings survivors of state-sponsored violence to lecture at U.S. universities. Her work has been published in more than twenty anthologies, and in journals in the U.S.A and abroad.

Alicia Partnoy nació en la Argentina en 1955. Durante los años que pasó en la cárcel como presa política, sus poemas e historias fueron deslizados en secretofuera de la prisión y publicados anónimamente en diarios y revistas de organizaciones de derechos humanos. Desde su llegada a los Estados Unidos ha dado numerosas conferencias por invitación de Amnesty International, organizaciones religiosas, universidades y otras entidades . Ha presentado testimonio sobre violaciones a los derechos humanos en la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, la Organización de los Estados Americanos, Amnesty International, y organizaciones de derechos humanos en la Argentina. Su testimonio aparece en "Nunca Más", El informe final de la Comisión Argentina para la Investigación de Desapariciones. Editó "You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile" (Cleis Press,1988), y es miembro del Consejo Directivo de Amnesty International U.S.A.

A. Partnoy tiene tres hijas: Ruth, a quien menciona en su cuentos y poesías escritos desde la prisión, y Eva Victoria y Anahí Paz, nacidas en los Estados Unidos.Actualmente vive con su esposo Antonio en Washington D.C.

For more on Alicia Partnoy and her current work:

https://www.lmu.edu/Page9228.aspx

Noenoe Silva

Wednesday, June 25 • 9:00–10:15 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Address: “Nā Hulu Kupuna: To Honor Our Intellectual Ancestors”

Noenoe Silva was born on the island of O‘ahu of Kanaka Maoli descent. She was raised in California but returned to Hawai’i in 1985. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Hawaiian language, a master's degree in library and information studies, and her doctorate in political science from the University of Hawai’i. In 2001 Silva joined the political science department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where she is an associate professor. She teaches courses in indigenous politics, and Hawaiian language and culture. Her book Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2004) won the Baldridge Prize for best book in history. She has also written on the role of hula, literature and representations of women in Native Hawaiian literature.

For more on Noenoe Silva and her current work:

http://www2.soc.hawaii.edu/css/dept/pols/Faculty/silva/nsilva.htm

http://www.sarweb.org/scholars/scholars/individuals/scholar06-07/silva.htm

Sidonie Smith

Tuesday, June 24 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Cross Cultures, Cross Purposes?

Sidonie Smith is Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women’s Studies, and Chair of the English Department at the University of Michigan. Her fields of interest include human rights and personal narrative, women’s autobiography, women’s travel narrative and memory, women’s studies in literature more generally, feminist theory, and postcolonial literatures. Prof. Smith’s publications include A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Indiana UP, 1987); Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Indiana UP, 1993); Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (co-edited with Julia Watson, U of Minnesota P, 1996); Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Gisela Brinker-Gabler, U of Minnesota P, 1997); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (co-edited with Julia Watson, U of Wisconsin P, 1998); Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (with Julia Watson, U of Minnesota P, 2001); Moving Lives: Women’s Twentieth Century Travel Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2001); Interfaces: Women’s Visual and Performance Autobiography (co-edited with Julia Watson, U of Michigan P, 2002); Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (with Kay Schaffer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Before They Could Vote: American Womens Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919 (co-edited with Julia Watson, U of Wisconsin P, 2006); and numerous articles.

Julia Watson

Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Mary Besemeres, Bella Brodzki, and Manuela Costantino

Julia Watson has co-written Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (second edition forthcoming 2009), and co-edited five collections with Sidonie Smith, most recently the anthology Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919 (2006). She is Associate Dean for Curriculum and Administration in the College of Humanities, and Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.

Gillian Whitlock

Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser, Susanna Egan, Leigh Gilmore, and Alfred Hornung

Gillian Whitlock is a professor in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago UP 2007), a study of life narrative and the “war on terror,” and she coedited (with Anna Poletti) the “Autographics” issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Winter 2008), and (with Kate Douglas) the double “Trauma Texts” issues of Life Writing (2008) (forthcoming as a Routledge book). She is currently working on a book titled Postcolonial Life Writing (for Oxford UP), and in 2009 she will be a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australia National University in Canberra, co-convening a conference on the limits of the human.

Zhao Baisheng

Tuesday, June 24 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Cross Cultures, Cross Purposes?
Copanelists: Noelani Arista, Margaretta Jolly, and Sidonie Smith

Zhao Baisheng is Professor of Comparative World Literature and Head of the Institute of World Literature at Peking University. Currently, he serves as Director of the World Auto/Biography Center at Peking University, and Editor of the official website of IABA (www.iaba.org.cn). His publications include Head of States: A Biography (1995), Portraits (2000), A Theory of Auto/Biography (2003), and Essays in European and American Literature: Auto/Biography Studies (2005).