Draft:Sidonie Smith

Biography
Sidonie Smith is the Lorna G. Goodison Distinguished University Professor Emerita of English

and Women&amp;#39;s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a past-President (2010)

of the Modern Language Association of America. Her fields of specialization include

autobiography studies, narrative and human rights, feminist theories, and women’s studies in

literature. Her interests in autobiography studies spans the topics of women&amp;#39;s self-representation;

testimony and human rights; the politics and ethics of personal narration; African American life

writing; and many genres of life writing, including travel narrative, graphic memoir, and on-line

sites of self-presentation. Across this body of theory, interpretation, and pedagogy, she explores

the historically contingent components of memory, experience, identity, embodiment, agency,

and politics that comprise autobiographical acts, as well as the flexibility of formal features such

as genre, narrative mode, and rhetorical address. She is the author or coauthor of nine

monographs, and has co-edited six essay collections and two anthologies. In the 2010s, she

played a national and international role in advocating and planning for the future of the

humanities, most notably through her 2016 open-access book, Manifesto for the Humanities:

Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times (which re-envisions the intellectual

mission of a doctorate), her work with the Mellon Foundation, and her presidency of the Modern

Language Association.

Education
Smith earned her undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature from the University

of Michigan in April of 1966 and her master’s degree in English Language and Literature from

Michigan in December of 1966. In 1971, she received her doctorate in English Literature from

Case Western Reserve University.

Academic Appointments
Smith taught at the University of Arizona from 1973-83, with a leave for one and a half years to

serve as a Program Officer in the Education Division of the National Endowment for the

Humanities in Washington, D.C. From 1983-1996 she taught and took up various deanships in

Harpur College of Binghamton University. From 1987-1990, she served as interim dean, the first

woman to lead the college. Smith returned to the University of Michigan in 1996 where she

chaired the women&amp;#39;s studies program and the English department and directed the Institute for

the Humanities. In 2007, she was elected Second Vice President of the Modern Language

Association of America and served as President in 2010.

She has lectured widely in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, China, Canada, Brazil,

and the United States. Her fellowships include the S.W. Brooks Fellowship, University of

Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; the Northrup Frye Fellowship, University of Toronto; the

Haydn Williams Fellowship, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia; a Visiting

Fellowship, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Australia; a

Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Bellagio, Italy; a Senior Fulbright Scholar fellowship,

Murdoch University in Perth and the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, Australia; and a

Canterbury Fellowship, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Books

 * Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2024). Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Third edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 * Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2017). Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith &amp;amp; Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, Maize Books.
 * Smith, Sidonie (2016). Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times. Ann Arbor, MI.: University of Michigan Press, (print and open access online formats)
 * Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson ( 2010). Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Second edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 * Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith (2004). Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave, St. Martin’s Press.
 * Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2001). Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 * Smith, Sidonie (2001). Moving Lives: Women&amp;#39;s Twentieth Century Travel Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 * Smith, Sidonie (1993). Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women&amp;#39;s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 * Smith, Sidonie (1987). A Poetics of Women&amp;#39;s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 * Smith, Sidonie (1974). Where I&amp;#39;m Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Edited Volumes

 * Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
 * The Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics, and the Games. Eds. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
 * Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.)
 * Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. Eds. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
 * Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
 * De/Colonizing the Subject: Gender and the Politics of Women&amp;#39;s Autobiography. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

Anthologies

 * Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819-1919. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
 * Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader. Eds. Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

Selected Essays

 * Theorizing the Subject. In Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press. Article published April 2020. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1132
 * Auto/biographics and Graphic Histories Made for the Classroom: Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men. With Julia Watson. Oxford Handbooks Online: Comic Book Studies. Ed. Frederick Aldama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190917944.001.0001/oxf ordhb-9780190917944-e-28. 15 March 2019. Published in print in The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. First Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
 * Autobiographical Inscription and the Identity Assemblage. In Inscribed Identities: Writing as Self-Realization. Ed. Joan Ramon Resina. London: Routledge, 2019. 75-90.
 * Timescapes, Backpacks, Networks: Writing Lives Across the Americas. In Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing. Eds. Ricia A Chansky Sancinito and Emily Hipchen. London: Routledge, 2016. 20-37.
 * E-Witnessing in the Digital Age. With Kay Schaffer. In Good Morning Freedom: Life Stories and Human Rights. Eds. Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.
 * Virtually Me: A Toolkit about Online Self-Presentation. With Julia Watson. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70-94.
 * Witness or False Witness?: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony. With Julia Watson. Biography 35.4 (Fall 2012): 590-626.
 * ‘America&amp;#39;s Exhibit A’: Hillary Rodham Clinton&amp;#39;s Living History and the Genres of Political Authenticity. Special issue on Political Memoir. American Literary History 24.3 (Fall 2012): 523-42.
 * Reading the Posthuman Backward: Mary Rowlandson’s Doubled Witnessing. Special Issue on Autobiography and Posthumanism. Biography 35.1 (Winter 2012): 137-52. Presidential Address 2011: Narrating Lives and Contemporary Imaginaries. PMLA 126.2 (May 2011). 564-74.
 * Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks. In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 61-72.