HUMSS Colloquium with Jacob Sider Jost

I will introduce the scholarly field of life-writing, using examples from across time but focusing on the British eighteenth century.  Life-writing is the study of texts (including biographies, autobiographies, and diaries--but also hagiographies, CVs, social media profiles, and film documentaries) that describe and narrate human lives.  My examples will include many of the key figures of eighteenth-century British literary culture, including Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and Edward Gibbon, and I will be guided by two key questions: how do new genres and technologies change the way we tell our life stories, and how do shifts in culture and ideas find expression in new kinds of life writing?