'Can Biography Survive?' Event

An event organised by the Centre for Imperial and post-Colonial Studies

The conference ‘Can Biography Survive?' is the third major event organised by the AHRC's ‘Challenges to Biography' Research Network, run by the University of Southampton's Faculty of Humanities, in partnership with the University of Nottingham and of Edinburgh.  The conference programme can be found on the Research Network's website, www.ahrcbiographynetwork.com.  Podcasts available via the website highlight the quality of discussion at the symposia hosted by each of the partner universities over the past year.  This July's conference boasts an unusually impressive array of contributors, drawn from both academia and the world of publishing.  Thus speakers include acclaimed biographers Richard Holmes and Claire Harman, man of letters Frederic Raphael, pioneering bookseller Tim Waterstone, Penguin editor Stuart Profitt, and poet turned professor Robert Fraser.  The conference will focus upon the question of whether biography, such a successful genre for so many years, now faces a crisis of confidence, commercial and conceptual.  The range of topics explored across two days in the plenary and panel sessions is striking, and demonstrates the international character of the conference.  Biography has proved a major area of intellectual inquiry in recent years, as reflected in the high expectation surrounding this unique gathering of academic and independent biographers, critical commentators upon ‘life writing', agents, and publishers. 

Speakers at this event: Gill Coleridge, Dan Franklin, David Godwin, Claire Harman, Richard Holmes, Miriam Owen, Stuart Proffitt, Frederic Raphael, Helen Rappaport, Linda Wagner-Martin, Tim Waterstone, Paal Antonsen, Elizabeth Baigent, Stephen Brooke, Becky Conekin, Jack Corbett, Alex Danchev, Tony Lentin, June Purvis, Silke Roth, Jeremy Treglown.

Register online on the AHRC Research Network Website