2016 Autobiography Conference: Report
For a report of the 2016 HSE autobiography conference, click here
The international conference “Autobiographical compositions in an interdisciplinary research environment: people, texts, practices” was held on 1-2 June 2016 in NRU The Higher School of Economics (Moscow). The conference consisted of 16 sections in which over 70 papers were presented by speakers from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Vologda, Tula, Tomsk, Smolensk, Tver, Ufa, Irkurtsk, Samara, Donetsk, and also from the Netherlands, the USA, the UK and Japan. The conference was the result of the work of the Research and Study Group devoted to the study of autobiography at HSE. A publication based on the papers given at the conference will follow.
Professor D.M. Nosov from the school of philosophy, the first deputy of the Dean of the faculty of humanitarian sciences at NRU HSE, and N. Katzer, director of the German Historical Institute in Moscow, opened the conference. The key-note speech was then made by the Dutch historian R. Dekker (University of Amsterdam) on the topic “Long-term developments in autobiographical writing in the Netherlands since 1500”. Plenary papers were given by T.A. Saburova (Indiana University) ““The Hidden autobiography” of A.V. Tyrkova-Williams: the autobiographical in memoirs and biographies,” D.Iu. Dorofeev (Saint Petersburg State Humanitarian University) “The anthropology of ancient auto-communications: the specificity of personal autobiographical self-consciousness” and E.K. Karpenko (NRU HSE) “Autobiographical Testimonies in an interdisciplinary perspective: an inventarization of texts and research approaches.” In the afternoon and evening sessions colleagues reported on the study of autobiographical texts in relation to particular genres (from confessions to memoirs and travelogues), studies of personal, family and state archives, and studies of a philological or purely biographical perspective. The first day finished off with a buffet where participants could share their research interests and discuss plans for collaboration in the future.
The second day kicked off with sections on the study of texts in the framework of Russian and European cultural history, gender studies, the history of Soviet file autobiography and the theory of media-studies. Further papers continued the discussion on the diversity of methodological approaches to the study of ego-documents and also explored the issue of the connection between autobiography and philosophy, cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, the history of science and political theory. The conference finished with the paper of V.O. Vasileva (NRU HSE) “The amateur occupations of family history: the case of the engineer N.M. Shchapov (1881-1960)” and the summing up of the head of the organising committee of the conference, professor Yu.P. Zaretskiy (NRU HSE).