IABA 8th Biennial Conference

17-20 July 2012, Canberra, Australia.

The Humanities Research Centre and National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, present Framing Lives, the 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association.

Call for papers open until 15 November 2011. For more information see: http://www.iaba2012.com. Enquiries to Leena Messina: leena.messina@anu.edu.au.

Who Are We?

In 1999, Zhao Baisheng created the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) at the First International Auto/Biography Conference at Peking University, attended by delegates from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. IABA aims to broaden the world vision of auto/biographers, scholars and readers, to deepen the cross-cultural understanding of self, identity and experience, and to carry on global dialogues on life writing. An organizing committee was formed in Beijing. After the conference, Craig Howes, director of the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, set up a listserv for IABA.

International Journals

For thirty years, Biography has been an important forum for well-considered biographical scholarship.

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies is a journal of scholarship devoted to autobiography, biography, diaries, letters and relations between lifewriting and other discourse.

Life Writing, one of the leading journals in the field of biography and autobiography, has the unique and unusual policy of carrying both scholarly articles and critically informed personal narrative.

Trajectories of (Be)longing

IABA Europe 2011 Conference
Trajectories of (Be)longing: Europe in Life Writing
Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia, May 18-20

Seeking to establish a network of European life writing scholars and to support European participation in international debates on life writing, a European chapter of IABA was founded in October 2009 at a conference at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This initiative is continued through a second IABA Europe conference in Tallinn.
Click here to visit IABA Europe in Tallinn.

IABA 2010 Conference Report

28 June – 1 July 2010
Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research

Many thanks to Margaretta Jolly and Sam Carroll for extending all of us a warm welcome to IABA 2010 at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. For this dissertation-writing graduate student, IABA 2010 offered an inspiring — if at times jarring — impact on work in progress. The sheer size and scope of the conference defies any effort at a complete or even representative report, and so I will restrict myself to remarks on keynote speeches and panel talks that I actually saw and heard.

IABA-Europe Founded in 2009

IABA-Europe fosters the participation of European scholars within the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) by organizing biannual conferences, publishing an e-journal, and facilitating contacts through this website http://www.iaba-europe.eu/.

The European chapter of IABA was founded at the conference ‘Life Writing in Europe’, held from 29-31 October 2009 at VU University in Amsterdam, hosted by Alfred Hornung, Marijke Huisman, Anneke Ribberink and Monica Soeting http://iaba-europe09.let.vu.nl/.

Life Writing & Translations

IABA reports as a rule now begin with remarks about location. Venues seem to have been chosen to work with the particular conference topic. On the crossroads of East and West, as much Asia as America and yet at same time its own seductive self, Hawai’i was no exception, for this year’s conference on Life Writing and Translation.

Auto/Biography and Mediation

5th International Auto/Biography Association Conference

IABA organized its fifth conference in July 2006 in Mainz, Germany. More than 170 scholars participated from five continents. The wide range of cultures and languages represented was nowhere more tangible than at the merry singing session crowning the conference dinner, where people all sang songs from their own countries.

Inhabiting Multiple Worlds

Auto/Biography in an Anti/Global Age

Hong Kong was the perfect setting for this life writing conference, with its focus on multiple worlds. The city provided both the inspiration for the theme and reminders of it, as conference speakers discussed autobiographies, biographies, letters, diaries, blogs and other life writing, all focused on moving between or inhabiting multiple worlds.

Life Writing and the Generations

15-19 July 2002
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

The theme of generations was an inspired one as the focus for this gathering of life writing scholars, practitioners and activists. Lying at the heart of so much life writing and certainly prominent in the contemporary memoir boom it had not yet been treated to a major conference, especially one of such international scope.

Autobiography & Changing Identities

Du 27 au 30 juillet, plus de 150 enthousiastes se sont réunis sur le campus de l’Université de la Colombie britannique (Vancouver, Canada) pour assister à un colloque sur l’autobiographie. Cette rencontre a été organisée par deux membres du département d’Etudes anglaises, Susanna Egan et Gabriele Helms, avec l’appui de Shirley Neuman, ancienne doyenne de la Faculté de Lettres, qui est maintenant à l’Université de Michigan.