Notes on Contributors
Kerry Brown
is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute, King’s College, London, and Associate Fellow on the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London. From 2012 to 2015 he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Prior to this, from 1998 to 2005, he served as a diplomat in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and then from 2006 to 2012 Senior Fellow and then Head of the Asia Programme at Chatham House. He was Director of the Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN) funded by the European Union. He is the author of 20 books, the most recent of which are China’s Dreams: The Culture of the Communist Party and the Secret Sources of its Power (Polity, Cambridge, 2018) and The Trouble with Taiwan: History, the United States and a Rising China (Zed Books, London, 2019).
Joanna Cymbrykiewicz
is a research staff member of the Institute of Scandinavian Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. Her main field of academic interest is contemporary Danish biofiction and biography, but she has also done research on Scandinavian litanic verse and Danish thanatological poetry. In 2019 she published a monograph Biografia jako pretekst. Modele współczesnych duńskich biofikcji (Biography as a Pretext. The Models of Contemporary Danish Biofictions).
Elsbeth Etty
is a specialist in Dutch culture, literary critic, columnist, and biographer. From 1973 until 1982 she was an editor of the communist newspaper De Waarheid and from 1987 until 2017 editor of NRC Handelsblad. In 1996 she got her PhD cum laude on the biography Liefde is heel het leven niet – Henriette Roland Holst 1869–1952, which was awarded with the Busken Huet prize and the Gouden Uil prize. In the years 2005–2015 she was appointed as extraordinary professor literary criticism at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2019 her biography In de man zit nog een jongen, of the Dutch poet Willem Wilmink appeared. Apart from various collected columns in NRC Handelsblad, which were awarded in 2008 with the Anne Vondeling prize for political journalism, she published amongst others the following books: De Nederlandse erotische literatuur in 80 en enige verhalen (2011), ABC van de literaire kritiek (2011), Het bloed van de barones – Seksueel geweld in Langs lijnen van geleidelijkheid (2013), and Minnebrieven aan Maarten – Over Maarten ’t Hart en zijn oeuvre (2019). Since 2017 she is president of the Multatuli Society.
Yannick Gouchan
is professor of Italian Literature and Culture at Aix-Marseille Université (France). He has taught in the Italian Studies Department and is a researcher at the CAER (in Romance Studies) since 2004. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journal Italies, the publishing house Stilo Editrice, and the Center PENS (Poesia Contemporanea e Nuove Scritture). His scholarship mainly concerns contemporary Italian literature, in particular poetry. He has published many works on Giovanni Pascoli, Attilio Bertolucci, and Vittorio Sereni, as well as on Paolo Maccari, Salvatore Quasimodo, and the Italian literature of World War I. His most recently published works are about childhood from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries (La figura del fanciullo nell’opera di D’Annunzio, di Pascoli e dei Crepuscolari, Cisalpino, 2016, and Enfances italiennes, Italies 21–22, Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2017–2018). As a member of the board of the Biography Society, he contributes studies on the relationship between poetry and biography.
Marı́a Jesús González
is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cantabria, Spain, and Senior Research Fellow at the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies (LSE, London). An expert in the political history of the reign of Alfonso XIII, she is author of Ciudadanı́a y Acción: El conservadurismo maurista 1907–1923 (1990) and the political biography of the conservative statesman Antonio Maura: El universo conservador de Antonio Maura: Biografı́a y proyecto de Estado (1997), shortlisted for the Spanish National Essay and History Prizes, 1998. She has also written the intellectual biography of the British hispanist Raymond Carr, Raymond Carr: La curiosidad del zorro: Una biografı́a (2010), shortlisted for the Spanish National Prize of History, translated into English as Raymond Carr: The Curiosity of the Fox (2013), and longlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize of Historical Biography, 2014. In addition to other chapters or articles on biographies of politicians or intellectuals, she has recently co-edited a book about a Spanish historian: M.J. Gonzalez and J. Ugarte, Juan Pablo Fusi: El historiador y su tiempo (2016). She now co-directs, with Prof. Anna Caballé, an international research project on biography: Biographical Reason: Biography and Autobiographical narratives in the Historical and Literary Research of 20th Century Europe: Case Studies and Theoretical Reflections. (HAR2017-82500-P, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity) AEI/FEDER/UE.
Nigel Hamilton
has published 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. He 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.
Richard Holmes
was the first Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, 2001–2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, and biographies of Shelley, Coleridge and young Dr Johnson. His study of scientists and poets The Age of Wonder won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (USA). He has also written about the early balloonists in Falling Upwards, which was one of Time magazine’s Top Ten Non-Fiction Books of 2013. His most recent book is This Long Pursuit, a study of his biographical methods and teaching. In 2018 he won the international BIO Award (USA) for sustained achievement in Biography.
Sahar Vahdati Hosseinian
has a BA in Mining engineering (minors: extraction) and a MA in Iranian languages (minors: Old Indo-Iranian languages). She was selected as brilliant talent of Tabriz University during 2016–2018. Her career in music began when she was only seven years old. She won top places in the National Youth Festival and the Fajr International Music Festival in the field of dulcimer playing. She started her research on biography at the age of sixteen, about Iranian (esp. Azerbaijan) eminent cultural persons. During these years, she published a book titled ‘Chehreh-ha’ (Prominent Personalities of Azerbaijan-Iran, 2011) and some articles in internal and external publications about short biographies of more than hundred Iranian eminent figures. She presented papers at international symposiums held in Turkey (Sakariya University) and Tajikistan (Academy of Science of Republic of Tajikistan); she cooperated as a researcher in Tajikistan oral history (executive: Iran-Tajikistan Friendship Association) and prepared and executed programs about biography of Iranian prominent personalities for Radio Tehran. From 2010 to 2012, she was member of editorial board of Hafteh magazine published in Montreal, Canada.
Liu Jialin
is professor of literature, deputy dean of School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, director of SJTU Centre for Life Writing. His publications include: Nabokov’s Poetic World (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 2012), Foreign Biography Dictionary (deputy editor in chief, Shanghai: Shanghai Dictionary Press, 2009), Introduction to Comparative Literature (co-author, Peking: Peking University Press, 2002). He is also the translator of Dostoevsky: the Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2016), Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011) and Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian Years (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009).
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
(Historian – PhD) is currently a Professor of Cultural History, Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Iceland. He is furthermore chair of the Center for Microhistorical Research. He has written 23 books and numerous articles published in Iceland and abroad. His latest books in English are: Wasteland with Words. A Social History of Iceland (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013), co-authored with István M. Szijártó, and Minor Knowledge and Microhistory (London: Routledge, 2016), co-authored with Davíð Ólafsson. Sigurður Gylfi is the founder and one of three editors of a book series named: “The Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culture” (Sýnisbók ı́slenskrar alþýðumenningar) which has so far published 25 books, mostly on the topics of egodocuments and everyday-life history. He is also co-editor with István M. Szijártó of a new international book series, Microhistories, published by Routledge.
Daniel R. Meister
is a Term Adjunct in the Department of History at Queen’s University. His doctoral dissertation, ‘The Racial Mosaic: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Canadian Multiculturalism’, was completed in 2019. In a previous article, entitled ‘The Biographical Turn and the Case for Historical Biography,’ he argued for the discipline of history to fully accept biography as a subfield.
Doug Munro
resides in New Zealand. He has taught in universities in Australia and Fiji and is now an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Queensland. His initial academic specialism was Pacific Islands history but he has increasingly identified himself as a biographer. His particular interest in ‘Telling Academic Lives’, which found expression in a special issue of the Journal of Historical Biography in 2014 (www.ufv.ca/jhb/Volume_16/Volume_16_TOC.pdf). Other publications include The Ivory Tower and Beyond: participant historians of the Pacific (2009), J.C. Beaglehole: public intellectual, critical conscience (2012) and Clio’s Lives: biographies and autobiographies of historians (2017), which he co-edited with John G. Reid.
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 ANU Press’ series in biography, ANU.Lives, 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.
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, and is a member of the board of Quaerendo; A Journal Devoted to Manuscripts and Printed Books. He edited (with Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma) the edited volume The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (Routledge, 2016). He is cofounder and vice president of the Société de Biographie / Biography Society.
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, and 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. The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath will be published in the spring and fall of 2020.
David Veltman
is working, as a PhD student at the Biography Institute (University of Groningen), on a biography of the Flemish artist Felix de Boeck (1898–1995). He has a Master’s degree in modern Dutch literature and is a specialist on twentieth-century Belgian biography and historiography. After graduating in 2005, he worked for eight years at the Haarlem-based auction house Bubb Kuyper. He is a freelance reporter for the Dutch artist’s magazines Atelier and kM (Artist’s Material).
Jana Wohlmuth Markupová
is lecturer and a head of the Department of Oral History – Contemporary History at Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She has also collaborated on several projects with the Institute for Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences. She has published a historical biography called Ivan M. Havel. From Puzuk to Sakateka (1938–1989) and she is a co-author of several oral history books (Peaceful Science? Changes and Constants in Works and Lives of Scientists in the Years 1968–2008, 2018; One Hundred Student Evolutions. University Students of 1989. Biographical Interviews in Longitudinal Perspective, 2019). In her PhD thesis she focuses on biography and microhistory.