The conference series “The Right to a Name: Biography in the 20th Century” is dedicated to the memory of Veniamin Viktorovich Iofe (1938-2002) and was established in 2003. Since 2015, the Iofe Foundation acts as the main organiser.
Each conference is interdisciplinary and presents a broad spectrum of contemporary biographical research in the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, literary studies and a number of other disciplines. We are interested in different approaches and their point of contact and in methods of describing and presenting biography.
The main topics for the 14th Conference are: Autobiography, Hagiography, Ego-documents, the Biography of Biographers, Sources, Collective Biography, Theory of Biography, Narratives, Political Biography, Biographical Dictionaries, Biography and Myth, Death and Biography and others.
All sessions will be plenary and in Russian. Papers must not exceed 20 minutes; every paper is followed by 20 minutes discussion. A conference volume will be published. Only papers given at the conference qualify for publication.
The conference organisers are unable to fund travel or accommodation in St Petersburg. There is no registration fee.
We are now inviting paper proposals. The deadline for proposals is 1 March 2016. Please send your proposal as a single file in Word format to iofe.readings@ gmail.com.
The proposal should contain an abstract of no more than 2000 characters in length and a short CV (name, employment/study, function, main publications – no more than 300 characters). The subject line should read “14th Readings. Paper Proposal *Your Name*”
Director: Irina Flige
Coordinator: Tatyana Kosinova