[Commlist] Call for Papers: Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics Conference

*Call for Papers*

**

Conference “*Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics**”//*

*//*

*February 6 and 7, 2020 at the University of Vienna*

*Collaboration of Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP) 
Research Laboratory, George Mason University, VA, and Department of 
English and American Studies, University of Vienna*


*Suggested Topics:*


• Has the term reputation lost relevance in the contemporary age of 
intense and deep mediatization and rapid globalization of life stories 
and their ever-changing, elusive evaluative reception?

• If processuality and relationality of agencies in production and 
reception of works of culture as well as the intransparency of the 
medium have become of guiding interest in contemporary auto/biography 
studies, how might the medial production of a reputation be 
systematically considered in processual terms?

• What is the benefit of the continuing address to the ancient category 
of character in discussions of ‘character assassination’? Who or what is 
a character in relation to personality, self, individual, protagonist, 
narrator, author?

• Has the term reputation become part of an elitist discourse that 
collides with precepts of the raceclass-gender and further categories of 
cultural-studies critiques? If there is an intersectionality of 
reputation, is there a transversality, as well?

• When politicians write autobiographies, how do the self-images created 
in these autobiographies relate to historiography and biography?

• How are fiction and non-fiction in auto/biography and autofiction as 
well as their discussion related to reputation constructions and their 
criticism?

• What are the relations of private and public practices of life writing 
with reputation building?

• How is the discussion of the mediality of works of auto/biography 
freshly challenged by

consideration of the multimodality of the medial channels and 
materialities through which reputations are generated and put to 
political use?

• How does historiography as a genre that is still often determined by 
descriptions of individual lives and personalities rather than 
relational perspectives, and as such still committed to its derivation 
from protocols of biography in antiquity, benefit from the critical 
combination of methods and theories of Auto/Biography and Reputation 
Politics Studies?


For a principal orientation regarding the two fields, respectively, and 
as a common ground for initiation of methodological discussion, we 
suggest /Routledge Handbook of Character/

/Assassination and Reputation Management/, ed. Sergei Samoilenko, 
Martijn Icks, Jennifer

Keohane and Eric Shiraev (Routledge, in print, fall 2019), or 
Samoilenko, Shiraev, Keohane and Icks, “Character Assassination 
(general)” in /The Global Encyclopedia of Informality/, ed. Alena 
Ledeneva (UCL Press 2018) 441–445, and /Handbook of 
Autobiography/Autofiction/, ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (De Gruyter 
2019). Please also see the websites of IABA, the International 
Auto/Biography Association, and of CARP Research Lab, 
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/homeand 
https://carplab.wordpress.com


We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically explixit papers that 
address critical

questions across an international variety of works, genres, media and 
practices, with attention to theoretical premises of both Auto/Biography 
Studies and Reputation Politics Studies. Conference language will be 
English. Several publishers, including Macmillan, Sage, Routledge, and 
Taylor & Francis, have expressed interest in the publication of a volume 
comprising the results of the conference.


Please send proposals (600 words maximum exclusive of references) plus a 
short academic biography to (nadja.gernalzick /at/ univie.ac.at) and 
(eshiraev /at/ gmu.edu) by October 15, 2019. Notice of acceptance will be given 
by October 30, 2019.





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