Professor Emeritus
sidsmith@umich.eduOffice Information:
4202 Angell Hall
Womens Literature; Postcolonial Studies; Emeriti; Twentieth Century American; American; Visual Culture; Law and Literature; Global and Transnational; Travel; Autobiography Studies; English; Theory; Gender and Sexuality; African American
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Case Western Reserve 1971 B.A., M.A. University of Michigan 1966
Highlighted Work and Publications
Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing
Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition--some well known, some forgotten over generations--who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections--from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches--span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote... See More
Human Rights and Narrated Lives<br>The Ethics of Recognition
Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the ... See More
Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2nd Edition)
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
The completely updated edition of the definitive guide to life narrative, from memoirs to blogsWith the memoir boom, life storytelling has become ubiquitous and emerged as a distinct field of study. Reading Autobiography, originally published in 2001, was the first comprehensive critical introduction to life writing in all its forms. Widely adopted for undergraduate and graduate-level courses, it is an essential guide for students and scholars reading and interpreting autobiographical texts and methods across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts.
Thoroughly... See More
Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader
Sidonie Smith
Life Writing in the Long Run gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century. It includes the introductions to their five edited collections; essays focused on such autobiographical genres as autoethnography, Bildungsroman, diary, digital life writing, genealogy, graphic memoir, human rights witnessing, manifesto; and essays engaging the key concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality, relationality, and visuality.
Available in print, eBook...
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