IABA Europe 2023
Life Writing in Times of Crisis
5–8 July 2023
University of Warsaw, Poland
5 JULY (Wednesday)
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM COFFEE, PRE-CONFERENCE WELCOME
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM OPENING
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM KEYNOTE 1: MAŁGORZATA CZERMIŃSKA: The Autobiographical Triangle and What Comes Next
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM LUNCH
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM SESSIONS 1
PANEL
SCALE/DISTANCE/LINE: TOPOGRAPHIES OF TRAUMA IN LIFE WRITING
Alexander Williams (University of Groningen)
Ernestine Hoegen (independent scholar)
Babs Boter (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Eveline Buchheim (NIOD Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Studies)
SESSION I
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
Clare Brant (King's College London), Crisis for Corals: Life Writing, Climate Crisis and Voices of Mass Destruction
Sam Meekings (Northwestern University in Qatar), Fragmentation and Reforging of Identity in Recent British Grief Memoirs
Astrid Joutseno (University of Turku), Cancer and Grief in Diaries and Social Media
SESSION II
LITERACY AND READING AS EXPERIENCE
Anna Poletti (Utrecht University), Reading for Our Lives: Getting Serious about Readers and Reading in Autobiography Studies
Małgorzata Litwinowicz (University of Warsaw), People in Literary Salons in the Times of the Great Depression: Around the Diaries of Peasants (1935–1936)
Anna Jaroszuk (University of Warsaw), Literacy Experience as an Experience of Discontinuity and Crisis in Polish Peasant Memoirs From the 1930s
SESSION III
DIARIES OF HISTORICAL CHANGE
Mateusz Chmurski (CEFRES / Sorbonne Université), Paroxysm and In/visible Change: Central-European Post-War Diaries (1914, 1918, 1939)
Lonny Harrison (The University of Texas at Arlington), Moralizing Terror: Life-Writing and Terrorism in Pre-Revolutionary Russia
Valeria Taddei (University College Dublin), Writers' Diaries and the First World War: Preparing Modernism?
SESSION IV
SUBJECTIVITY AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION
Ioana Luca (National Taiwan Normal University), Life Narratives and Postsocialist Crises
Bilyana Manolova (Utrecht University), Life Writing as Technology of Self-Construction for the Post-Socialist Subject
Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz (Polish Academy of Sciences), Narratives of Crisis: Autobiographical Self, Great History and New Emotional Regimes in Polish Memoirs of the 1980s
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM COFFEE BREAK
4:00 PM - 5:30 SESSIONS 2
PANEL
THE TESTIMONIES OF OLGA LENGYEL: SO MANY QUESTIONS
Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh)
Sheila Jelen (University of Kentucky)
Gabriel Finder (independent scholar)
Christoph Thonfeld (Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site)
Peter Davies (University of Edinburgh)
SESSION I
COLLECTIVE ISOLATION: LIFE WRITING DURING THE PANDEMIC
Helga Lenart-Cheng (Saint Mary's College of California), Eastern European Covid Diaries: Harnessing the Prosocial Potential of Collective Diaries Without Building a Surveillance State?
Marleen Rensen (University of Amsterdam), “Eighteen Years in Quarantine”: Corona Crisis and Communism in Nausicaa Marbe’s Memoir Waiting for the West
Katja Herges (University of Wrocław), Affective Politics and Digital Publics in Collective Life Narratives of Covid-19
SESSION II
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
Ilana Blumberg (Bar Ilan University), Ordinary Crisis: Helping Students Write Lives of Ongoing Struggle
Agnieszka Sobolewska (University of Warsaw), Between Rage and Fatigue: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth (1937–1939) in the Light of Life Writing Strategies and the History of Emotions
Sergio Barcellos (UERJ – Rio de Janeiro State University), When Facts and Affects Collide: Diary Writing as a Historical Fact and Political Move
SESSION III
WRITING AND DRAWING WARTIME HERSTORIES
Natalia Panas (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), Bolnica Stobart: Three Autobiographical Herstories About the Great War in Serbia and Their Position in Serbian Cultural Memory
Hélène Martinelli (ENS de Lyon), Women Drawing (during) the World War II
Anna Seidl (University of Amsterdam), Crises, Affects, and Relationality in Katja Petrowskaja’s The Photograph Looked Back at Me (2022)
5:45 PM - 7:15 PM 10th ANNIVERSARY OF EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF LIFE WRITING
7:15 PM COCKTAIL
6 JULY (Thursday)
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM SESSIONS 3
PANEL
ACADEMIC WOMEN’S NARRATIVES:
NAVIGATING CRISIS IN THE PROFESSION AND BEYOND
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle (The College of New Jersey)
Kate Douglas (Flinders University) (on-line)
Leena Käosaar (University of Tartu) (tentative)
Eva Karpinski (York University)
Marina Deller-Evans (Flinders University) (on-line)
Elizabeth Rodrigues (Grinnell College)
Ricia Anne Chansky (University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez) (video)
SESSION I
LETTERS: BETWEEN INTIMACY AND SELF-EXAMINATION
Carol Acton (St Jerome's University at the University of Waterloo), Intimacy as Emotional Survival: Letter Exchanges Between Couples in the First World War
Maarja Hollo (Estonian Literary Museum), Nostalgia in Kurt Eiskop’s Letters to His Wife in 1940–1941
Monika Kopcik (University of Warsaw), ‘Je ressemble à un jouet inutile’: Self-Examination in Karol Szymanowski’s Elisavetgrad Letters
SESSION II
MOURNING THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Max Casey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), ‘Dead skin was my real skin’: Flat affect and the intimate impersonal in Esmé Weijung Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias
Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), “I Have Not the Assurance to Assert That I Am Alive”: Epistolary Accounts of the Crisis of Ageing into Old Age
Magdalena Staroszczyk (University of Warsaw), Remembering Kim Lee: Performative Biography and Queer/COVID Mourning
SESSION III
POETICS OF IDENTITY CRISIS
Laura Schlosberg (Stanford University), Recrafting a Life After Crises: Some Examples From Zinaida Volkonskaia's Archival Documents
Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj (University of Warsaw), Second Person Autobiography and the Identity Crisis
Vanessa Berry (University of Sydney), Continuity and Rupture: Crisis in Lifelong Autobiography with Christa Wolf's One Day a Year
SESSION IV
EVERYDAY LIFE IN HOLOCAUST TESTIMONIES
Alexander Williams (University of Groningen), “Ghosts Inside the Fence”: Exploring Life within the Nazi Extermination Camps Sobibór and Treblinka
Anita Jarczok (University of Bielsko-Biala), Ration by Ration – Time and Hunger in Holocaust Diaries from the Ghetto
Anna Pekaniec (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), 'I' in the City and History: Renia Spiegiel's Diaries 1939–1942: Everyday Life in Wartime Przemyśl
11:00 AM - 11:30 AM COFFEE BREAK
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM KEYNOTE 2: MONICA SOETING: ‘Silence Remains, Inescapably, a Form of Speech’: The Things That Are Not Mentioned in Life Writing
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM LUNCH
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM SESSIONS 4
ROUND-TABLE
LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle (The College of New Jersey)
Alfred Hornung (Obama Institute, University of Mainz)
Julie Rak (University of Alberta)
Ioana Luca, Helga Lenart-Cheng (NTNU & Saint Mary’s College of California)
SESSION I
AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AS DE-FACEMENT?
Aleksandra Grzemska (University of Szczecin), Literary Autoethnographies in Crisis
Elizabeth Jansen (York University), Reclaiming Identity: Carrying Ancestral Wisdom Across Time and Place
Zuzanna Sala (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), Life-Writing in Literary Criticism: Situated Knowledge or Epidemy of Exhibitionism?
SESSION II
THE ARCHIVAL TRACES
Louise Franklin (Bristol School of Art), Alex Franklin (independent scholar), Refuting the Myth of the “Madman”: Chaim Soutine’s Harvard Art Museums Archives letters
Alex Belsey (King's College London), “So That is the Way it Ends”: the Crises of War and Peacetime in the Journal of Keith Vaughan
Iana Nikitenko (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Multitemporal Spatial Life-Writing in Wartime Radio Features by Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas
SESSION III
QUEER TESTIMONIES
Adriana Kovacheva (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), Self-Understanding, Survival and Emplotment: A Queer Fable from Generalgouvernement
Chloe Green (University College Dublin), Dream House as Queer Testimony: Carmen Maria Machado’s Ephemeral Archive and the Reader/Witness
Joanna Anczaruk (University of Warsaw), Experience of Initiation in the Autobiographical Narratives of Polish LGBTQ+ Community
SESSION IV
LETTERS OF CRISIS
Rowa Nabil (Cairo University), “To You, My Love and Thousand Kisses”: Reading Prison Letters by Political Detainees in Post-Independence Egypt
Maria Puri (independent researcher and translator), Re-visiting the Trauma, Making Sense of the Past: Prison Writings from Punjab
Anna Foltyniak-Pękala (University of Bielsko-Biala), The History of the Disease Written on Postcards: Correspondence of Marian and Kazimierz Brandys
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM KEYNOTE 3: JACEK LEOCIAK: Wartime Diaries: Diaristic Forms of Writing in Liminal Situations (at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews – POLIN)
7 JULY (Friday)
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM SESSIONS 5
PANEL
WAR CRISIS IN THE EYES OF WITNESSES AND SURVIVORS
Lucyna Marzec (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Monika Browarczyk (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Dagmara Drewniak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Katarzyna Macedulska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
SESSION I
FOCUS ON CHILDHOOD
Veronica Ghirardi (University of Turin), Merā Bacpan Mere Kandhoṁ Par by Sheoraj Singh Bechain: Childhood Wounds and Collective Struggle
Meritxell Simon-Martin, Gloria Jove (LLeida University), Life-Writing as an Innovative Method in Teacher-Education During the First Biennium of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1933)
Marta Rakoczy (University of Warsaw), "I Will Write Every Day What I Did": Autobiographical Narratives of House of Orphans’ Children (1912-1939) in the Perspective of Critical Childhood Studies
SESSION II
MODERNIST RECONSTRUCTIONS
Dennis Kersten (Radboud University), From Crisis to Reconstruction: Tracing Metamodernism in Contemporary British Biography
Paulina Pająk (University of Wrocław), The Lives Behind the Books: Reconstructing the Przeworskis’ biographies
Joanna Piechura (University of Warsaw), Christine Brooke-Rose’s “Remake”: Modes of Loosening and Vanishing the Author
SESSION III
THE PANDEMIC AND PERFORMATIVITY
Aneta Ostaszewska (University of Warsaw), Doing Research During Crisis as an Auto/biographical Experience: Pandemic as Another (Auto/biographical) Turn in Research?
Angeliki Ypsilanti (Ionian University), COVID-19 Intersections Between Academic and Creative Writing
Anna Piniewska (University of Warsaw), Strategies for Survival: Lockdown Through the Eyes of Actors with Disabilities
SESSION IV
ON BEING ILL
Michael Lackey (University of Minnesota), Combating Mental Illness: Biofictions about Empress Elisabeth and King Ludwig II
Julia Dallaway (University of Oxford), “Images That Shimmer”: Joan Didion’s Migraine Aesthetic
Antoni Zając (University of Warsaw), “Locked in a Stalemate”: The Ongoing Crisis of Posttraumatic Existence in Leo Lipski’s Letters to Irena Lewulis
11:00 AM - 11:30 AM COFFEE BREAK
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM KEYNOTE 4: LEENA KÄOSAAR: Life Writing and the "Ordinary" in Crisis
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM LUNCH
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM SESSIONS 6
PANEL
TEACHING LIFE WRITING TEXTS IN EUROPE
Dennis Kersten (Radboud University)
Ilana Blumberg (Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv)
Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak (University of Wroclaw)
Meritxell Simón-Martín, Gloria Jové (LLeida University)
Helga Ramsey-Kurz (University of Innsbruck)
Elsa Lechner (Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra)
SESSION I
COLLECTING DATA
Łukasz Wróbel (University of Warsaw), “Crisis” and “Passio”: Encyclopedists on Creating Encyclopedias
Elizabeth Rodrigues (Grinnell College), Modeling Lives as Data
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir (University of Iceland), The Family Archive in Times of Crises
SESSION II
TRANSATLANTIC BRIDGES
Eva Karpinski (York University), Dispatches from Eastern Europe: The Myrna Kostash-Nancy Burke Correspondence and the Emergence of Canadian Studies in Poland
Craig Howes (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), Crises Political and Personal in Times of Profound Success: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
Adela Kobelska (University of Warsaw), The Polish Scholar in Europe and America – Florian Znaniecki’s Autobiographical Writing on Emigration
SESSION III
WARTIME DIARIES
Zoltán Z. Varga (University of Pécs / Research Center for Humanities, Institute of Literary Studies), Diary Writing as Part of a Survivor Kit: Strategies of Survival in Wartime Diaries
Janna Aerts (University of Amsterdam), Societal, Personal and Literary Crises in Amsterdam And Brussels’ Occupation Diaries From the Second World War
Maciej Libich (University of Warsaw), The War Diaries of Leopold Buczkowski: An Anthropological Reading
SESSION IV
THE SHADOW LINE
Klaus Kaindl (University of Vienna), Three Versions of a Life: Memory, Identity and Agency in the Memoirs of Hiltgunt von Zassenhaus
Eliza Maureen Altenhof (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), The Ultimate Crisis: When One’s Own Life Ends
Piotr Sidorowicz (University of Warsaw), Academic Dealing with Death – Stefan Żółkiewski
4:00 PM - 4:30 PM COFFEE BREAK
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM SESSIONS 7
PANEL
BODILY AND EMOTIONAL CRISIS:
A REFLECTION ON ILLNESS AND DISABILITY NARRATIVES
Francisco José Cortés Vieco (Complutense University of Madrid)
Franziska Gygax (University of Basel)
Maria Isabel Duran Gimenez-Rico (Complutense University of Madrid)
SESSION I
THE SOCIOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF LIFE WRITING
Jeremy Popkin (University of Kentucky), American Jewish Women's Memoirs: A Genre and Its Evolution
Caroline Zuckerman (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), The Intermarriage Question
Andrés Villagrá (Pace University), Relational Life-Writing in Abel Azcona's Performance Art
Regine Strätling (Université de Montréal), Identity Crises and Sociological 'écriture' in Transclass Memoirs
SESSION II
PICTURING CRISIS
Nancy Pedri (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Understanding my Illness Experience: Infographics in Graphic Illness Narratives
Christopher Conway (University of Texas at Arlington), The Diary of Anne Frank in Mexican Comics
Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak (University of Wrocław), Environmental Crisis in Comics Life Writing: Visual Witness, Oral History and Journalism in Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020)
Erin La Cour (Vrije Universitet Amsterdam), Autofictional Graphic Medicine
SESSION III
BEHIND THE FRONTLINE
Aleksandra Bednarowska (Pedagogical University of Cracow), "It's 3:30 PM and We're Still Alive" – Yevgenia Beloruset's Wartime Diary
Juulia Niiniranta (Tampere University), Visual Narratives of Trauma and Peace
Marcin Telicki (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), Man's Search for Meaning in Serhiy Zhadan's Poetry
SESSION IV SNS ROUNDTABLE
7:30 PM CONFERENCE DINNER
8 JULY (Saturday)
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM SESSIONS 8
PANEL
EXPERIENCES OF GRIEF, EXPERIMENTS WITH FORM
Anne Rüggemeier (University of Freiburg)
Héloïse Lecomte (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
Wojciech Drąg (University of Wrocław)
SESSION I
MODERNIST LIFE NARRATIVES
Desiree Henderson (University of Texas at Arlington), The Crisis of Masculinity in Short Diary Fiction
Karolina Kulpa (University of Warsaw), Compensation by Hiding: Cryptanalysis of Stefan Themerson's Prose
Cathy Perkins (UNSW Sydney), Caviar for Breakfast: The Life-Narratives of Two Australian Playwrights in Eastern Europe before and after the Second World War
SESSION II
LIFE WRITING BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN
Diana Painca (Transilvania University), Life Writing and the Poetics of Ego-Resiliency
Jagoda Wierzejska (University of Warsaw), Writing Down a Life Crisis under the Security Office’s Surveillance: the Case of Leon Getz
Giedrė Šmitienė (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore), Writing on the Edge of an Abyss
SESSION III
BEYOND CONFESSION
Krista Quesenberry (Albion College), Meshing the Political, the Personal, and the Popular with Kay Boyle’s Spanish piece
Łukasz Żurek (University of Warsaw), Against Confession: Negation of Commodity Form in Laura Osińska's (Anna Adamowicz's) nonsense[ ]sense
Maxime Geervliet (University of Edinburgh), The Geo-autobiographical Confession: Location, Displacement and Guilt in the Poetry of Ghayath Almadhoun
SESSION IV
PANDEMIC WRITING: BETWEEN UNIQUENESS AND CONVENTION
Agnieszka Graff (University of Warsaw), Rage, Race, Conspiracy, and COVID – We Were Three (Series, 2022) as Aural Memoir of the Pandemic
Eloise Faichney (University of Melbourne), “There’s Something Locked in that Box of Dreams”: Women’s Dream Journals in the Crises of WWII and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Shira Stav (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Poetic Memoirs in a Time of Crisis: “Corona Diaries” in Hebrew Poetry
11:00 AM - 11:30 AM COFFEE BREAK
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM SESSIONS 9
PANEL
LIFE-WRITING, CANCER AND MATERNAL GRIEF
Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku)
Astrid Joutseno (University of Turku)
SESSION I
LIFE WRITING AND THE MIGRATION CRISIS
Helga Ramsey-Kurz (University of Innsbruck), Whose Crisis? Whose Life? Whose Writing?
Ernestine Hoegen (independent scholar) Navigating Dangerous Spaces in Life Writing From Japanese WWII Internment Camps
Cristine Sarrimo (Lund University Centre for Languages and Literature), Two Asylum-Deeking Border Crossers’ Autobiographies and Their Effects on Swedish and Norwegian Migration Agencies
Phoebe King (University of Queensland), The Anxiety of Reception: Reading 'No Friend but the Mountains' in Europe
SESSION II
RESPONSES TO CRISIS
Nadine Walter (University of Rostock), Progressive Evangelical Women Writers’ Responses to the Overturn of Roe v. Wade
Magdalena Ożarska (Jan Kochanowski University, Kielce), Spiritual Awakening as Crisis: Evidence from New Age Spiritual Memoirs
Honorata Sroka (University of Warsaw), Franciszka Themerson’s Wartime Drawings
Alexandra Nagel (Allard Pierson, Amsterdam), Your Life Written in Your Hand: The Philip Meerloo Handprint Collection (1936–1942)
SESSION III
BUILDING COMMUNITIES
Jacek Kubera (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), The City of Poznań as Experienced by its Inhabitants in Four Epochs
Gabriele Linke (University of Rostock), Uses of Life Narratives in the Memorialization of Vietnamese Contract Workers' Lives in the GDR/Germany
Antonina Tosiek (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), Analogies of Crises: Diaries of Peasants from the 1930s and 1990s
Łukasz Kożuchowski (University of Warsaw), Vision of Human Nature in Peasant’s Egodocuments in 19th Century Kingdom of Poland
SESSION IV
PRACTICING LIFE WRITING TODAY
Li Shan Chan (University of Hawai'i at Manoa), Listening is the Antidote
Petra Teunissen (Leiden University), Life Writing for the Elderly with Volunteers
Elsa Lechner (Center for Social Studies-University of Coimbra), On-line Biographical Workshops in Times of Confinement: Recording and Sharing Life in a Worldwide Crisis
Betty O’Neill (University of Technology, Sydney), Letters from Exile
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM LUNCH
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM CLOSING DISCUSSIONS
