Autobiography Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Permission To Be Yourself: An Interview With Mira Jacob

The National Book Critics Circle finalist for her Autobiography, Good Talk

March 6, 2020 • by Mira Jacob and Ramya Ramana

--- Ramya Ramana [RR]: So first I want to say thank you for writing this, from the bottom of my heart because it was just so refreshing to read a story that I could see myself in, and so much of your journey. I felt like I see myself and I ...

Permission To Be Yourself: An Interview With Mira Jacob

Feature

The Universal Memoir: An Interview with Nora Krug

The NBCC autobiography award winner on Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

May 5, 2019 • by J.P. Apruzzese

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. MFA ...

The Universal Memoir: An Interview with Nora Krug

Feature

Why Does a Historian Write a Memoir?

The adventures of a postmodern historian

September 27, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Aurell shows that professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, the bulk of them in the last few decades. "It is possible," he suggests, "that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals." Perhaps, then, my work ...

Power and Crisis

Against “Charm”

The Uses of Autobiography for Philosophy

December 20, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Moreover, how other philosophers lived and died is not the most important thing about them either: while life and work are inseparable, the latter takes pride of place. Heidegger went too far in saying that all one needs to know about Aristotle, for philosophical purposes, was that he lived, then ...