Religion and Life Writing in Early North America

Workshop L: seminar room P108 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Oliver Scheiding (Mainz)

 

1. Alexandra Wagner (Humboldt Universität, Berlin), "'But to declare the truth, not to set forth myself': Forms and Functions of Early North American Autobiographical Practices"

2. Patrick M. Erben (University of West Georgia), "'Ship-Mate-Ship': Commemorating the Lives of Friends in Francis Daniel Pastorius's Anniversary Poems"

3. Rachel Wheeler (Purdue University / JGU Mainz), "Trials of the Spirit: A Mohican-Moravian Man's Life in a Revolutionary Age, 1740-1815"

4. Carsten Junker (Universität Bremen), "Narrating Family Lives: Forms and Functions of Samuel West's Memoirs"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contact:

Alexandra Wagner
alexandra.b.wagner@googlemail.com

Patrick M. Erben
perben@westga.edu

Rachel Wheeler
wheelra@uni-mainz.de; wheelerr@iupui.edu

Carsten Junker
carsten.junker@uni-bremen.de

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Life writing in colonial North America derives many of its distinctive features from a transatlantic Protestant culture and its religious networks. This workshop intends to explore the intersections between religion and life writing by looking more closely at the diversification of the colonies’ populations and the expansion of the genres and the autobiographical practices that went along with it. The workshop is informed by Thomas Bender’s call for "deprovincializing the narrative of American history" (2002). It thus seeks to integrate the stories of American lives with other stories within the larger context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

The workshop invites papers that relate to the wide variety of narrating early American lives, such as biographies, autobiographies, diaries, journals, letters and translations that have been promulgated in the colonies by settlers, missionaries, printers, travelers, ministers, women, former slaves, Native Americans, or that have been circulated in the pages of periodicals, broadsides, or other forms of popular print. The workshop is particularly interested in papers which discuss fresh source materials so far neglected in current scholarship. Papers may also focus on narrative practices that allow for a more complete autobiographical treatment of eighteenth century Native Americans, African Americans, and Women. Likewise, the workshop solicits papers on the nexus between formal and functional aspects of autobiographical texts in which life writing registers and validates different religious, regional, ethnic and gendered lives in the colonies and the early republic.