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  • Contributors

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is author of a national sentimentality trilogy—The Anatomy of National Fantasy (U of Chicago P, 1991); The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke UP, 1997); and The Female Complaint (Duke UP, 2008)—whose concern with aesthetics, affect, and the political amplify in Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011). She has also edited volumes on Intimacy (U of Chicago P, 2001) and Compassion (Routledge, 2004).

Jesse Field is a doctoral candidate in Asian Literatures, Cultures and Media at the University of Minnesota.

Vesna Goldsworthy is Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. Her books, including Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale UP, 1998), a groundbreaking study of cultural representations of the Balkans, and Chernobyl Strawberries (Atlantic, 2005), a bestselling memoir about growing up in Belgrade under Tito, have been translated into many languages. Chernobyl Strawberries was serialized in The Times and on the BBC. In Germany, where it was published in 2006 as Heimweh nach Nirgendwo [Homesick for Nowhere], it had thirteen editions in the year of publication.

Margaretta Jolly is a Reader at the University of Sussex. She is editor of The Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Routledge, 2001) and author of In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (Columbia UP, 2008), for which she won the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK book prize.

Helga Lénárt-Cheng graduated from Harvard University in 2007 with a PhD in Comparative Literature. She currently teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her most recent research focuses on the political and social implications of life writing, including the utopia of the everyday.

Joanne Leonard is the Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollack Distinguished University Professor of Art and Women’s Studies and a faculty associate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. A pioneer in feminist intimate public art, her presentation at the Life Writing and Intimate Publics conference, “Being in Pictures: Exploring Visual Autobiography,” suggested some of the challenges in creating fully integrated works of texts and images, while opening a space for consideration of photo-memoir [End Page 249] alongside recent graphic autobiographies. Her cover photo for this issue, Julia and the Window of Vulnerability, is from Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo-memoir (U of Michigan P, 2009).

Gabriele Linke is Professor of British and American Cultural Studies at the University of Rostock (Germany). She is the author of Populärliteratur und kulturelles Gedächtnis (Winter Verlag, 2006), in which she re-reads American and British popular romances as cultural memory. Recently, she has published essays on British and American film, and contemporary autobiographical writing, edited a collection Teaching Cultural Studies (Winter Verlag, 2011), co-edited an interdisciplinary publication in gender studies, and continued her work on contemporary Scottish autobiography.

Ioana Luca is Assistant Professor at National Taiwan Normal University, where she teaches courses in life writing, American studies, and American literature. She has published articles on exiles’ life writing in Social Text, Rethinking History, and Prose Studies, and is completing a book on autobiography and exile in twentieth century American literature.

Claire Lynch is Lecturer in English at Brunel University in London. She has written on life writing in text and media forms, including Irish Autobiography (Peter Lang, 2009), and “Trans-genre confusion: What does autobiography think it is?” in Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She is currently working on a book length study of WDYTYA with Prof. Peter Lunt.

Laura E. Lyons is Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She teaches and publishes on issues in post-colonial literatures and theory, Irish literature, and emerging resistances to the state and the homogenizing forces of global capitalism. With Purnima Bose, she edited the recent collection Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation (Indiana UP, 2010), and with Cynthia G. Franklin, she edited a Biography Special Issue, “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing” (27.1, Winter 2004).

Aimée Morrison is Assistant Professor of English at the University of...

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