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  • Editors' Note
  • Craig Howes

Like most journals, over the years Biography has published special issues or clusters, several of which have been recognized by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals—two Best Special Issue awards, and one Special Issue Honorable Mention (second place). Less common is Biography's longstanding commitment to publishing its "Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing," and more recently, its equally substantial "International Year in Review." But from its first issue in 1978, Biography has been principally a forum journal, dedicated to publishing unsolicited articles from a wide variety of disciplines, and solicited reviews of recent critical and theoretical publications devoted to some aspect of life writing.

This issue continues the tradition, and renews this commitment. Seven very substantial articles and twenty-one reviews—nothing else. But a quick comparison of our first and latest issues reveals that some things have changed, largely in response to changes in the field itself. Although Biography declared itself an An Interdisciplinary Quarterly from the start, all of the first six articles dealt with American, English, and French literary or historical subjects. The current issue's seven articles deal with religious, psychoanalytic, broadcast, graphic, and social media texts from a far wider range of geographic locations—North America and Western Europe, but also the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Western Asia, with glances at Africa and South and Eastern Asia for important context.

The reviews display a similar expansion. Both reviews in Biography vol. 1, no. 1 dealt with American subjects—a dictionary of librarian biographies and a biography of a US diplomat. This issue contains assessments of publications covering many centuries and almost all the continents, ranging from theoretical works devoted to gender issues in biographical fiction and life writing; to photography and graphic texts; to life writing texts by artists, young women, and mountain climbers; to works devoted to global, transnational, Indigenous, and anthropocenic issues; to studies devoted to specific regions—anglophone Africa, Nigeria, Korea, and the Caribbean; to methodological work on forensic identification; to historical assessments, whether regarding nineteenth century British or French literature, or work on spiritual memoir spanning many hundreds of years.

This issue and the next one are forum issues. The articles came in over the transom—although no one knows what that is any more—and went through extensive revision. The resulting quality testifies to the expertise of our acquisitions editors and peer reviewers, whose suggestions are often transformative. The reviews [End Page vii] are all solicited, which speaks to the field knowledge our editors possess, as well as the editorial and the diplomatic skills of our staff—Paige Rasmussen, our managing editor, and Caroline Zuckerman, our book review editor. (Editing a solicited publication all too frequently requires different skills than preparing an essay submitted for publication.)

Though our special issues and clusters and our annual features are integral to Biography's mission, we still believe that our most important service as a journal is to offer a forum for excellent research, and a very substantial range of well-informed reviews of critical and theoretical work devoted to life writing. This is the surest means for representing the field as it diversifies, expands, and grows.

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A note on the cover image for this installment of Biography. A number of factors often come into play when selecting this image—permissions, picture quality, cost, suggestiveness of life writing, and so on. For vol. 46, no. 2, we decided that Leonardo da Vinci would be appropriate—first because Freud's "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood" features prominently in Agnieszka Sobolewska's essay on the birth of psychography in this issue, but second because the image is a presumed self-portrait—a visual evaluation very much in keeping with Biography's focus on the critical and theoretical approaches to life representation. [End Page viii]

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