Notes on Contributors
Nigel Hamilton
senior fellow in the McCormack Graduate School, UMass Boston, has written more than twenty books, including Biography: A Brief History, and multi-volume biographies of Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, President Bill Clinton, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as a best-selling biography of the early life of President John F. Kennedy. He has won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, the Templer Medal for Military History, and the New York Blue Ribbon Award for Best Documentary (Profile). His works have been translated into sixteen languages, including French, German, Dutch and Chinese. Nigel taught History and the History of Biography at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 1995 to 2000, and was made Professor of Biography at De Montfort University, where he pioneered undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the History of Biography and Approaches to Biography. He established the British Institute of Biography in collaboration with Royal Holloway, and won a Feasibility Award from the Arts Council of England and Wales to establish Britain’s first center for biography. Moving to the United States in 2000, he helped found Biographers International Organization (BIO) and was elected its first President. His own specialty is military and presidential history and biography; his The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942 (Houghton Mifflin, 2014) was nominated for the National Book Award 2014. His three volume biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR at War, (2014–2019), was nominated for the National Book Award 2014. With Hans Renders he published in 2019 The abc of Modern Biography, the Persian translation in 2021 appeared at ritm in Iran.
Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson
is President of Iceland. He was a Professor of History at the University of Iceland before becoming president in 2016. His most recent books are Gunnar Thoroddsen. Ævisaga (Reykjavı́k: jpv, 2010), The History of Iceland (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations) (Santa Barbara (CA): Greenwood, 2013), and Fyrstu forsetarnir (Reykjavı́k: Sögufélag, 2016).
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
is Professor of Cultural History, Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Iceland and senior researcher at the National Museum of Iceland. He is chair of the Center for Microhistorical Research (www.microhistory.org) at the University of Iceland. He is the founder and one of three editors of the book series ‘Sýnisbók ı́slenskrar alþýðumenningar’ (The Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culture) on egodocuments and everyday life history. He has written What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (with István M. Szijártó; 2013) and numerous other books and articles published in Iceland and abroad.
Emma McEwin
has a BA and Honours degree in English literature and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. She is the author of An Antarctic Affair (East Street Publications, 2008) and The Many Lives of Douglas Mawson (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018). ‘Nancy Atkinson, bacteriologist, winemaker and writer’ was published in Issue no.1 of The Australian Journal of Biography and History in December 2018.
Melanie Nolan
is Professor of History, Director of the National Centre of Biography and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography in the School of History at the Australian National University (anu). Her work includes Breadwinning (2000) a history of women and the state, and Kin (2005), a collective biography of a working-class family which won the 2006 aranz Ian Wards Prize and was short-listed for the 2007 Ernest Scott Prize. Her edited publications include Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist, Perspectives (1994) and, most recently, as general editor, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 18 (2012) with vol. 19 forthcoming. She chairs the Editorial Committee of the anu Press series in biography, ANU Lives Series in Biography, and is on the Editorial Board of the Australian Journal of Biography and History. She is currently working on a manuscript about historians’ biographical practices which is under contract with Routledge.
Kerstin Maria Pahl
is an art historian and literary scholar. She currently works as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, where she investigates the poetics and politics of insensibility in nineteenth-century Britain and the British Empire. She studied art history, classical archaeology, and German literature in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Cambridge and worked for the Cultural Foundation of the German Länder (Kulturstiftung der Länder). Her Ph.D. thesis (collaborative Ph.D. at HumboldtUniversity Berlin and King’s College London) explored portraiture and life-writing in England between c. 1660–1790 and was funded by the German Academic Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). Her area of expertise and main research interests are British art, literature, and culture, portraiture and life-writing, history of emotions and non-emotions, and social history of art and literature.
Eric Palmen
studied history at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Palmen wrote about urban history of Rotterdam and Dordrecht. He is the author of Kaat Mossel. Helleveeg van Rotterdam (2010) and Dwaze liefde. Een familiegeschiedenis (2011). He was involved in Images of the Future, a major project of Eye Film Museum with the National Archives and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision for the preservation and digital disclosure of the film heritage of the Netherlands. He developed a method for the research of copyrights and the application of the Orphan Works Directive that the European Community adopted in 2012. Palmen is chief editor of biografieportaal.nl, a review weblog concerning biography in the Netherlands. He writes about biography for several newspapers and magazines. Palmen is specialized in American Biography and interviewed authors like Kitty Kelly, Nigel Hamilton, John Aloysius Farrell, Carl Rollyson and Nick Weber. Currently he is working on a biography of Adrianus Johannes van Domburg, a Catholic film critic who put his mark on Dutch film culture with his ideas about Absolute Film.
Hans Renders
is Professor in History and Theory of Biography and is director of the Biography Institute, both at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He was a member of the founding committee of the Biographers International Organization (bio). He has written biographies of the Dutch poet Jan Hanlo (1998) and the Dutch journalist and author Jan Campert (2004). He is editor of the Biographical Studies series and the editor-in-chief of a series of edited reprints of Dutch and foreign biographies. He has published studies on the theme of biography in various international journals, among them Journal of Historical Biography, Le Temps des Médias, and Storia della Storiografia. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Quaerendo; A Journal Devoted to Manuscripts and Printed Books and he is member of the Editorial Board of the Australian Journal of Biography and History. He edited (with Binne de Haan) the volume Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Brill, 2014) and (with Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma) the edited volume The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (Routledge, 2017). With Nigel Hamilton he published in 2018 The abc of Modern Biography, the Persian translation in 2021 appeared at ritm in Iran. He is cofounder of the Société de Biographie / Biography Society. In collaboration with Sjoerd van Faassen he works on the first biography of Theo van Doesburg.
Carl Rollyson
Professor Emeritus of Journalism, at Baruch College, cuny, has published twelve biographies: A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan, A Private Life of Michael Foot, To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie, Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography, American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend, Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic, Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, and three studies of biography, A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography, Biography: A User’s Guide and Confessions of a Serial Biographer. His reviews of biography appear in Reading Biography, American Biography, Lives of the Novelists, Essays in Biography in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion and other newspapers and periodicals. He has published four biographies for young adults on Pablo Picasso, Marie Curie, Emily Dickinson, and Thurgood Marshall. Recently he published This Alarming Paradox: The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath.
David Roth
researched as Ph.D. candidate the history of mental health care in the School of History at anu after initial studies in chemistry and a long career in the IT industry. His thesis topic is ‘Life, Death and Deliverance at Callan Park Hospital for the Insane 1877 to 1920’. He has particular interests in the mortality of the mentally ill and the history of medications. His publications include ‘Chemical Restraints at Callan Park Hospital for the Insane before 1900’ in Health and History. David has contributed to the Australian Civil Liberties Association’s submission to the Commonwealth Royal Commission on Aged Care, writing on chemical restraints. He is a member of the Australian Historical Association and the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine.
István M. Szijártó
is Professor of History at Eötvös University, Budapest. He has published several books about the social and cultural history of politics in 18th-century Hungary as well as the theoretical and methodological problems surrounding microhistory. His books in English are What is microhistory? Theory and practice. Routledge: London–New York, 2013 (co-author: Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon) and Estates and constitution. The parliament in eighteenth-century Hungary. Berghahn: New York–Oxford, 2020.
Jeffrey Tyssens
studied history at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, where he is currently professor of contemporary history. He was visiting professor or visiting research fellow in Paris, Mainz, Leiden and Berkeley. He has published extensively on the history of anticlericalism and secularism in western Europe, on funerary culture in the 19th century, on educational conflicts and the like. Tyssens is also a specialist in the history of freemasonry and other fraternal societies. He published several biographical articles with regard to American freemasons and leaders of American fraternalism at large. In 2016 he edited a special issue of the Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism on biography and the history of fraternalism. He is member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Belgian History, the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire and of the Revista de Estudios Históricos de la Masonerı́a Latinoamericana y Caribeña.
David Veltman
worked as a Ph.D. student at the Biography Institute (University of Groningen) on a biography of the Flemish artist Felix de Boeck (1898–1995). In July 2021, he defended this biography as a PhD thesis before the University of Groningen. In his book questions were raised about De Boeck’s relation to the avant-garde of his time. At an early age, De Boeck decided to earn his living as a farmer, in order to be independent from art galleries and museums. This decision was used as a framework to examine the way his artistic development was of influence to the development of his political views. Special attention was given to the interface between the artist’s selfrepresentation and the shifting place of the artist in society. Together with Hans Renders, David wrote the yearly report for the Netherlands in the International Year in Review – issue of the magazine Biography in 2017, 2018 and 2020.