Project MUSE®: Biography - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Biography.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1978) through current issueLatest Articles: BiographyTWOProject MUSE®Biography1529-14560162-4962Latest articles in Biography. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981413
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The sending off of this issue to press is bittersweet. It is the last issue that has been fully in the hands of Paige Rasmussen. Paige assumed the position of Managing Editor for Biography in 2018. For the past seven years, she has brought to Biography her superb editing and design skills. Consider, for example, the award-winning special issue on Graphic Medicine! She also has managed the Center for Biographical Research—a job with many moving parts—with patience, sensitivity, and extraordinary competence. Paige has done everything from running workshops for our special issues, to copyediting, to weighing in on submissions, to communicating with authors, to managing our budget and finances, to navigating often
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallEditor's Note2026-01-30text/htmlen-USEditor's Note2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®53422026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30"Silence will not protect you": Asserting Body Politics in Contemporary Spanish Autofiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981414
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On October 18, 1840, Hippolyte Bayard takes the first known photographic self-portrait, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, capturing his own fictional suicide with a camera.1 A series of parallels can be drawn between Bayard's artwork and the origins of the autofictional mode of life writing. Photography, "a visible sign of that which was," had constituted for many the closest approximation to the dream of modernity—the dream to entrap the present moment, and with it, what is real (López-Gay, Ficciones 49–60).2 In Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, the representation of the author's own death disrupts the aura of authenticity and truthfulness that had become attached to photography — and, by extension, to the cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmall"Silence will not protect you": Asserting Body Politics in Contemporary Spanish Autofiction2026-01-30text/htmlen-US"Silence will not protect you": Asserting Body Politics in Contemporary Spanish Autofiction2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®1300802026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30"The Shared Text of Our Days": Witnessing and Repair as Rejection of Neoliberal Feminism in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981415
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The central act of Doireann Ní Ghríofa's 2020 memoir, A Ghost in the Throat, is the reading and translating of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. This eighteenth-century lament, first composed in the oral caoineadh (keening) tradition, holds crucial literary significance within the Irish canon—in part for its portrayal of colonial violence and religious discrimination. Ní Ghríofa recognizes the Caoineadh in A Ghost in the Throat for its Irish cultural significance, and she further engages with it to measure the beats of her own life: the keen and its author are constant companions who remain "steady as a pulse" throughout Ní Ghríofa's experiences as a working-class, stay-at-home mother (55). Ní
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmall"The Shared Text of Our Days": Witnessing and Repair as Rejection of Neoliberal Feminism in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat2026-01-30text/htmlen-US"The Shared Text of Our Days": Witnessing and Repair as Rejection of Neoliberal Feminism in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®705922026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Present Change for Future Lives: Greta Thunberg's Climate Activist Life Writing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981416
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Greta Thunberg is known across the globe for kickstarting the youth-led movement Fridays For Future (FFF) in 2018. She is also known for criticizing politicians: in a speech at the Youth4Climate Forum in 2021, she directed her ire at Presidents Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, among others, for their empty promises: "There is no Planet B. There is no Planet Blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" (Dewan). Thunberg is also known for her very public 2020 confrontation with Donald Trump, and in 2022 with influencer, car-enthusiast, and misogynist Andrew Tate, which granted her viral celebrity and even praise from Elon Musk (Tabahriti).1 Thunberg's words, frequently transformed into rallying cries and memes by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallPresent Change for Future Lives: Greta Thunberg's Climate Activist Life Writing2026-01-30text/htmlen-USPresent Change for Future Lives: Greta Thunberg's Climate Activist Life Writing2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®1064292026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Writing Returns: Unsettling Borders and Resisting Fragmentation in the Work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981417
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As we write this piece, the latest attacks on our people in Gaza, which targeted a primarily civilian population already suffering collective punishment inflicted by a brutal siege, demonstrate that Palestinians may be killed and eliminated even within the safety of their own homes.Writing our stories of return and home, taking the ruins of the Nakba as our analytical point of departure, is a step towards defying those powers that have denied the continuous Nakba, our humanity, and our love as Palestinians to take our place in historical memory.The current article discusses Israel's violent application of border logic and the Palestinian radical resistance to it through a close reading of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallWriting Returns: Unsettling Borders and Resisting Fragmentation in the Work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud2026-01-30text/htmlen-USWriting Returns: Unsettling Borders and Resisting Fragmentation in the Work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®973402026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Hearing the Post-Soviet Soul: The Relational Poetics of Listening in Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981418
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"I listen … I turn more and more into a big ear, listening all the time to another person."As a Nobel Prize-winning author, and one of the most internationally recognized literary voices from the post-Soviet world, the work of Ukrainian Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich—variously described as journalist, oral historian, and documentary novelist—has attracted abundant scholarly attention across the humanities, particularly for its kaleidoscopic, polyvocal portrayal of post-Soviet remembrance. Whatever genre critics attribute to her writing, Alexievich's work remains fundamentally concerned with lived experience, particularly the intimate worlds of individuals transformed by the catastrophic events of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallHearing the Post-Soviet Soul: The Relational Poetics of Listening in Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets2026-01-30text/htmlen-USHearing the Post-Soviet Soul: The Relational Poetics of Listening in Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®892822026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30The Signature and the Sigil: Fortean Biography, Chaos Magick, and a Metabiographical Approach to Proper Names in Jonathan Downes's The Owlman and Others
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981419
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Metabiography, as articulated by Caitríona Ní Dhúill, allows us to theorize the different strategies by which biography operates as a hermeneutic, illuminating what it helps us to know and how (24). Thus far, metabiographical criticism has primarily focused on writers whose work sets out to explore biography self-reflexively. I would argue, however, that to fully capture the range of metabiographical practice, we must also pay careful attention to how biography is deployed by writers whose metabiographical strategies emerge from the demands of ideological and subcultural contexts, rather than from a desire to explore biography directly. In these contexts, the limitations of normative biography prevent or conflict
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallThe Signature and the Sigil: Fortean Biography, Chaos Magick, and a Metabiographical Approach to Proper Names in Jonathan Downes's The Owlman and Others2026-01-30text/htmlen-USThe Signature and the Sigil: Fortean Biography, Chaos Magick, and a Metabiographical Approach to Proper Names in Jonathan Downes's The Owlman and Others2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®977912026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality ed. by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981420
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Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality is a far-reaching exploration of the different angles from which we read the figure of the contemporary author, and the trends, tendencies, and tensions that determine them. Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King's compelling introduction maps the social and literary influences behind the self-positioning of the author from the seventeenth century through to the end of the twentieth century, and presents, correspondingly, four key characteristics of contemporary authorship that are threaded throughout the volume's diverse discussions: responses to the digital revolution; identity politics, self-representation, and narrative legitimacy; the compulsive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallReading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality ed. by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USReading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality ed. by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®95482026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship by Jennifer Natalya Fink (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981421
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Jennifer Natalya Fink's opener to All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship is compelling: as an adult, the mother of a nonspeaking autistic daughter, she discovered that, decades earlier, two of her cousins had been born with Down syndrome, institutionalized, and erased from her family's history—"de-lineated," in her word. This was a matter of deliberate ableist estrangement, even though the cousins in question were well cared for. One result for Fink was that her situation with her daughter had appeared to be without precedent; she had been deprived of knowledge and experience that might have been passed on to her as part of her kinship. Her book thus interrogates the roots of this kind of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallAll Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship by Jennifer Natalya Fink (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USAll Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship by Jennifer Natalya Fink (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®128242026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Racial Dimensions of Life Writing in Education ed. by Lucy E. Bailey and KaaVonia Hinton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981422
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Lucy E. Bailey and KaaVonia Hinton's edited collection, Racial Dimensions of Life Writing in Education, concludes with "A Love Letter to Black, Indigenous and Women of Color(s)," which builds on the tradition of political open letters and is grounded in womanist and feminist theories and practices. Written by healer-activist-scholar Reanae McNeal, the letter is steeped in deep care, and indeed love, for her readers—care rooted in experiential knowledge and routed through conversations with the life writings of Black, Indigenous, and women of color(s), including Gloria Anzaldúa, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga. As a reader of feminist autobiographical accounts, McNeal pays attention to these women's life
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallRacial Dimensions of Life Writing in Education ed. by Lucy E. Bailey and KaaVonia Hinton (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USRacial Dimensions of Life Writing in Education ed. by Lucy E. Bailey and KaaVonia Hinton (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®167532026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30African Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions by Toyin Falola (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981423
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Toyin Falola's African Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions presents a groundbreaking intervention in the study of life writing by centering African traditions of storytelling, memory, and identity. Departing from Eurocentric frameworks, Falola challenges dominant paradigms of autobiography rooted in Western notions of the individual self. He demonstrates how African memoirs function not only as personal narratives but also as cultural texts embedded in communal values, historical consciousness, and collective memory. This theoretical orientation aligns with broader efforts to reimagine "epistemologies of the South." As one of the most esteemed intellectuals of the global South, Falola
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallAfrican Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions by Toyin Falola (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USAfrican Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions by Toyin Falola (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®94442026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981424
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In Before Equiano, Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues for fragmentary accounts of enslaved people—in the form of runaway advertisements, newspaper accounts, among others—to be considered slave narratives. He holds these to be the historical precedents for thinking, writing, and imagining the earliest Black people's lives across the Atlantic. Hutchins views the nineteenth-century single-authored, book-length slave narratives to be successors of these earlier slave narratives. Further, he outlines how international relations and foreign affairs were central to North American slavery of the eighteenth century, which was replaced by racialization only toward the late eighteenth century. His archive for both the expansion
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallBefore Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USBefore Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®111702026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades by Regina Marie Mills (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981425
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In Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades, Regina Marie Mills provides a sociocultural, historical, gendered, and political analysis of AfroLatinx writers and literature from the early twentieth century until 2021. In the introduction, Mills describes the development of AfroLatinx life writing and how US AfroLatinx writers "have defined themselves and generated a rich array of Afro-Latinidades" (4). Focusing on themes of visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility, Mills examines memoirs, biographical essays, newsletters, sketches, short stories, and other forms of AfroLatinx life writing. Mills includes the life writings of Afro-Latino, AfroLatina, and queer AfroLatinx writers from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallInvisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades by Regina Marie Mills (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USInvisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades by Regina Marie Mills (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®173902026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Women Vloggers, Cultures & Nature: Narrativising Rural Lifescape by Alberta Natasia Adji (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981426
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Alberta Natasia Adji's Women Vloggers, Cultures & Nature sits at the intersection of media studies, cultural studies, and life narrative studies. Drawing on five case studies of young women who share their rural lives on YouTube, Adji shows how these women use vlogging to construct and present their identities in relationship with media technologies, culture, place, and the beyond-human landscape. Adji skillfully navigates how these young women narrativize their lives through their intricate and intertwined connections to their unique natural-cultural contexts. Recognizing the deliberate, creative work of these online narratives, Adji analyzes their personal, social, and cultural significance. She positions them as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallWomen Vloggers, Cultures & Nature: Narrativising Rural Lifescape by Alberta Natasia Adji (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USWomen Vloggers, Cultures & Nature: Narrativising Rural Lifescape by Alberta Natasia Adji (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®115992026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back: Symptoms of Sincerity by Charles Reeve (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981427
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If the generally accepted premise of autobiography is that it provides a truthful account of its author's life, and that it describes a stable and verifiable reality, then artists must rank among its most mercurial and confounding practitioners. At the very least, artists are frequently regarded as impishly averse to telling the unadorned truth and fond of playing fast and loose with the facts, such as Frida Kahlo changing the year of her birth to that of the outbreak of the Mexican revolution. If artists seem particularly inventive with what many would call "the truth," then the point has often been made that their livelihood and fundamental calling is the creation of illusions in service of a greater vision or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallArtists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back: Symptoms of Sincerity by Charles Reeve (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USArtists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back: Symptoms of Sincerity by Charles Reeve (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®180602026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Native Removal Writing: Narratives of Peoplehood, Politics, and Law by Sabine N. Meyer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981428
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With its sweeping analysis of Native-authored writings ranging from the early days of Indian Removal in the first half of the nineteenth century to present-day struggles against the appropriation of cultural property, Sabine N. Meyer's Native Removal Writing offers a genre study of Native literary texts that engage with, repurpose, and reimagine Indian Removal. Meyer primarily examines what she calls "Removal novels," from John Rollin Ridge's (Cherokee Nation) The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) to contemporary speculative fiction by Blake Hausman (Cherokee Nation), Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), and Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Nation). However, she also puts these fictional texts into conversation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallNative Removal Writing: Narratives of Peoplehood, Politics, and Law by Sabine N. Meyer (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USNative Removal Writing: Narratives of Peoplehood, Politics, and Law by Sabine N. Meyer (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®165802026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Biography: An Historiography by Melanie Nolan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981429
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Biography has a long history, and historians have also been engaged in its practices for a considerable time. Numerous debates have emerged over the uses, theories, and methods of historical biography. Melanie Nolan contributes to these discussions with the book Biography: An Historiography, which examines the use of biography among Western historians. In Biography, Nolan presents and examines seven major debates on practice, theory, and method in the context of biography and history. She systematically considers the different discussions and challenges that historians have faced in using and writing biography—or biographies, reflecting the genre's diversity—from the nineteenth century to the present.Spanning nine
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallBiography: An Historiography by Melanie Nolan (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USBiography: An Historiography by Melanie Nolan (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®160052026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Translating Europe in Ælfric's Lives of Saints by Luisa Ostacchini (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981430
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Luisa Ostacchini's Translating Europe in Ælfric's Lives of Saints is not a book about biographies so much as a book about a biographer—a serial biographer—and his effort to create a sense of belonging to a local as well as global community through his re-collections of saintly lives. The title accurately reflects Ostacchini's thesis that Ælfric (c. 955–1010) is translating Europe for his imagined English audience in order to induce in them a feeling of local unity through a shared Christian heritage from an imagined Europe. In this sense, the book bolsters a concept of Christendom in early medieval England usually attributed to a slightly later era, such that one might argue for Ælfric to be considered one of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/25/image/coversmallTranslating Europe in Ælfric's Lives of Saints by Luisa Ostacchini (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USTranslating Europe in Ælfric's Lives of Saints by Luisa Ostacchini (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®109702026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30