Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances

Elleke Boehmer is professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Internationally renowned for her research in post-colonial theory and the literature of empire, Professor Boehmer currently works on questions of migration, identity, and resistance in both colonial and post-colonial literature (sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). She has published over eighteen books, including four novels; her best-selling biography of Nelson Mandela has been translated into Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai. She obtained her doctorate from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Kate Douglas is a Professor in English at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (2010) and the co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (2016; with Anna Poletti). Her edited collections include (with Ashley Barnwell) Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (2019). Kate is the Head of the Steering committee for the International Auto/Biography Association's Asia-Pacific chapter.

Katherine Collins is a poet and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research spans the creative and critical practices involved in the writing of marginalised lives, such as the politics and poetics of life writing, testimonial cultures and witnessing, and autobiographies of resistance.

John David Zuern is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai?i at Manoa and a co-editor the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His recent work on life writing and digital literature has appeared in Comparative Literature and (with Laurie McNeill) in the volume Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge 2019).

Anna Poletti is Associate Professor at Utrecht University and co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Their recent work on life writing includes Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (2020), and the entry “Identity Technologies” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.