Biography After Empire Symposium

Biography After Empire will bring together scholars to explore the uses of biography in postcolonial literary studies. This two-day workshop is an essential opportunity for scholars working on biography and life writing projects. It will allow scholars to share draft chapters from their ongoing research and exchange ideas for the proposed edited volume, Biography After Empire: Artists and Intellectuals in the Postcolonial World.

This workshop rethinks the genre of biography from postcolonial literary contexts. Colonial rule brought disparate philosophical conceptions of the individual self into contact, radically altering ideas about which lives should be remembered, and what forms that remembrance might take. The workshop will give contributors the opportunity to read one another’s work-in-progress and will address topics including but not limited to: archival research and source materials, interviews, methods for reconstructing individual lives, colonial education and literary bildung, local and international reception, and canonization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Organized by Stephanie Newell, Bhakti Shringarpure, and Lily Saint.