Transnational Lives/Biography Across Boundaries

Mary Patten on the Deck of Neptune's Car
Gordon Johnson
Courtesy of the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company

Dates

Wednesday 26 July to Friday 28 July 2006

Program and and Abstracts and Report

Public Lecture (now on MP3)

Conveners

Professor Desley Deacon, E: Desley.Deacon@anu.edu.au
Dr Penny Russell, E: Penny.Russell@arts.usyd.edu.au
Professor Angela Woollacott, E: Angela.Woollacott@hmn.mq.edu.au

Keynote Speakers:

Keynote Speakers will include Martha Hodes, History, New York University and Cassandra Pybus, Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath, University of Tasmania. The impulse to biography has often had a national base, and in its conventional forms biography has tended to serve national interests. Yet lives - occupations, networks, relationships, families, households, and the intimate - have eluded national borders in multiple ways that this conference seeks to explore. Mobility has been a central factor of modernity, facilitated by technologies of transport and communication and by modern notions of improving and changing the self. The structures of colonialism, indentured, convict and migrant labour, globalising economies, transnational cultural media - including film and theatre, higher education and professional training, have all contributed to lives that transcend the national.

What difference does it make to biography and to history to think of lives as transnational? What conceptual work do we have to do to think about lives as transnational? What makes a life transnational? What is the significance of the local in a transnational life? What possibilities does biography present for the writing of global histories? Can the history of diaspora be written via collective life stories? What historical developments, such as the passport, have forced life stories into national boundaries?

A variety of disciplines and media that address the conceptual challenges, practical difficulties and intellectual possibilities of telling transnational life stories will be addressed. Possible session themes include:

  • The politics of life stories.
  • The local and the transnational.
  • Elite and subordinate selves.
  • Empire and intimacy.
  • Domesticity and family in mobile lives.
  • Modernity and the transnational.
  • Transnational, cosmopolitan, global, international, diasporic?
  • Practical research problems and solutions.
  • Audience and publication.
  • Biographical dictionaries in a global world.
  • Ethics, private lives and ethics committees.

Conveners details:

Professor Desley Deacon
History Program, Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University
Canberra ACT Australia 0200
Tel: 61 2 6125 2356 direct
61 2 6125 2354 History office
Fax: 61 2 6125 3969
deacon@coombs.anu.edu.au
http://histrsss.anu.edu.au

Dr Penny Russell
History, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
The University of Sydney
NSW Australia 2006
Tel: 61 2 9351 2362
61 2 9351 2862 History office
Fax: 61 2 9351 3918
penny.russell@arts.usyd.edu.au
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/history/

Professor Angela Woollacott
Department of Modern History, Division of Humanities
Macquarie University
NSW Australia 2109
Tel: 61 2 9850 8877
61 2 9850 8879 History Office
Fax: 61 2 9850 8240
http://www.modhist.mq.edu.au/
angela.woollacott@hmn.mq.edu.au