Department of English

What does it take to create a biography that is academically credible, narratively compelling, and comprehensively inspirited? How do we collect the events of someone’s existence and situate them in time and space? How do we attend to experiences of upbringing, professional aspirations, love(s), joy, loss, and adversity according to socioeconomics, gender, race, travel, and religion or spirituality? And how do we determine what is appropriate or not for an honest biography to disclose, address, or downplay in an individual’s narrative? Students in this seminar will determine exemplary approaches to researching, theorizing, memorializing, and assembling “soulful” life stories from archives, oral histories, interviews, and multimedia production by engaging a set of prominent biographies in African American history that address these dimensions. This course is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates who are interested in the research and craft of biography.