Sidonie Smith

Sidonie Smith is a past-President of the Modern Language Association of America (2010). That experience led her to write Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times. (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Available open access at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dcbooks.13607059.0001.001. She is author of Where I'm Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography (1974), A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (1987) Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993), and Moving Lives: Women's Twentieth Century Travel Narratives (2001), as well as numerous essays. With Kay Schaffer, she co-authored Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004). With Julia Watson, she co-authored Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001; expanded edition 2010) and co-edited one anthology and four volumes of critical essays, among them De/Colonizing the Subject: Gender and the Politics of Women's Autobiography (1992); Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996), and Inter/Faces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002). Her latest book, with Julia Watson, is Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (2017). This book is available in ebook, print-on-demand and online open access formats.

Field(s) of Study: Autobiography studies, feminist theories, women’s literature, human rights and narrative