Thomas Austenfeld on Robert Lowell at The Editorial Institute: Wednesday Oct. 30, 5:30

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Memoir, not Autobiography: Lowell’s Self-Articulation Reexamined

Thomas Austenfeld (University of Fribourg)

Wednesday, October 30th at 5:30 pm at Boston University’s Editorial Institute, 143 Bay State Road

Thomas Austenfeld is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He holds MA and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature from the University of Virginia and taught at American Universities for twenty years before returning to Europe. Austenfeld is the author of American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman (2001) and the editor of Kay Boyle for the Twenty-First Century (2008) as well as co-editor of Writing American Women (2009, SPELL 23) and Terrorism and Narrative Practice (2011). His edited volume Critical Insights: Barbara Kingsolver appeared in 2010. He has published scholarly articles on authors as diverse as Lord Byron, Wallace Stevens, Katherine Anne Porter, Peter Taylor, Thomas Wolfe, Josef Pieper, Derek Walcott, Louise Erdich, Philip Roth, Frank Norris, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Lowell, as well as autobiographic essays in the annual American Literary Scholarship. He is currently at work on a book about American poets’ memoirs. Since 2013, he has been serving as Secretary General of IAUPE. the International Association of University Professors of English. His talk, entitled “Memoir, not Autobiography: Lowell’s Self-Articulation Reexamined,” seeks to rethink the position of confessional poetry in American literary history in its reverberations into the present time, with close attention to the generic differences between “autobiography” and “memoir.”

RSVP to Lesley Moreau, lmoreau@bu.edu