Editors’ Note

When George Simson started this journal in 1978, the cover of the first issue announced that Biography would be “An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.” The masthead inside affirmed this claim, with editors listed for Public Figures, History, Social Science, and Psychology. Two years later, Music, Art, Medical History, and Law had been added, so the desire to publish articles from a wide range of disciplines and regions has always driven Biography’s editorial efforts.

What might strike some readers today is that there was no Literature editor. This was not because the area wasn’t valued, but because it was in fact the default. Despite the desire for interdisciplinary scholarship, most of the articles were written by literature and history professors, and dealt with European and American subjects. George Simson, Anthony Friedson, LaRene Despain, and others in the core editorial group were all trained in literature, and even when the shift to women’s and cultural studies began having its huge effect on life writing studies, the main players, in Biography and elsewhere, still tended to be literary scholars.

Thirty-seven years later, the landscape looks different. Far more articles now deal with the Global South, and the impact of memoir, biography, testimonio, oral history, personal witness before boards and commissions, and online platforms and social media on our notions of identity, and our awareness of marginalized and suppressed peoples has been astounding, and has demanded our attention. A quick look at the topics of Biography’s most recent, and very popular, special issues and clusters—Posthumanism, Baleful Post-coloniality, Corporate Personhood, Malcolm X, Lives in Occupied Palestine, and Online Lives 2.0, and with Indigenous Lives and Caste and Life Narratives on their way—suggests that the interdisciplinary orientation of the journal has endured, but taken on new forms.

When I also think of the development of the International Auto/Biography Association over the past sixteen years, I recognize that the locations of life writing conferences, and the heightened awareness of how large regions can find common and fruitful grounds for discussion, have also transformed our sense of the discipline. This past year the regional conferences for IABA were held in Ann Arbor (IABA Americas), Madeira (IABA Europe), and Adelaide (Asia-Pacific). Next’s year’s international conference will be in Nicosia, Cyprus, and the following year will see regional assemblies in Jamaica, London, and an Asian site to be named later. The 2018 International? Brazil.

I therefore now understand the term “Interdisciplinary” in our title as more about place, methodology, and crucial issues than about a staged conversation between academic fields—especially since that conversation tended to be dominated by critics and historians anyway. And Biography will continue to value writing that goes beyond where our limits have been, or causes us to look again closely at what has always been in the neighborhood.