Brief Description

Report by Gabriel Helms (UBC)

"AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND CHANGING IDENTITIES" took place at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, 27-30 July 2000. Organized by Susanna Egan, Gabriele Helms, and Shirley Neuman, this conference brought together over 130 participants from Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. The over 60 presentations (12 of them by students) included a paper on the Genome project, another on autobiography as normative, others on jazz, film, photography, the Holocaust, trauma, AIDS, diary-writing, history, autocritography, and so on. Many of these papers were interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Our plenaries were delivered by a truly stellar cast of speakers: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson; Philippe Lejeune; John Eakin; and Suzanne Bunkers, Helen Buss, and Brenda Daly. 3 plenaries and 19 other papers have been published in a special issue (24.1) of biography in 2001, edited by Egan and Helms. For entertainment, the conference program included a dinner at the First Nations Longhouse, a reception at the Museum of Anthropology, and a dinner cruise on the paddlewheeler "Constitution".