June 6, 2014
Prof. Julia Watson participates in Queer Places, Practices, and Lives Symposium
Julia Watson, Professor of Comparative Studies recently served as a session chair for the panel “Locating Desire: Reading Queer Identity and Resistance across Space and Time" as part of the Queer Places, Practices, and Lives Symposium II at OSU. Professor Watson has also had a busy year of various conferences, invited talks, publications, and professional service. Some recent activities:
Publications
"Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation." With Sidonie Smith. Identity Technologies: Producing Online Selves, ed. Julie Rak and Anna Poletti. University of Wisconsin Press, 2013, 70-95.
"Witness or False Witness? Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony." With Sidonie Smith. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 35.4 (Fall 2012): 590–627. (Published spring 2013).
“Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates: The Metrics of Authenticity in When I Was Puerto Rican.” Life Writing, Special Issue on Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora, 10:2 (June 2013), 129-50.
Short Pubs:
Book Review:
Postcolonial Francophone Autobiography in Africa and the Antilles, Edgard Sankara, Univ. of Virginia Press. Research in African Literatures, Fall 2013, 205-6.
Interview:
L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 24: 2 (2013). “Autobiographical Acts: Interview with Julia Watson” (in German), Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich, 119-24.
Brief Essays:
“Studying the Digital Self,” with Sidonie Smith. Chronicle of Higher Education: The Digital Campus. April 25, 2014, B26-7.
Contribution, with Sidonie Smith, to “Panel on Life Sciences and Life Writing.” American Lives. Ed. Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter-Verlag, 2013, 537-61.
External University Affiliations, 2013:
• Visiting Docent, Selbstforschunggrüppe, Friedrich Meinicke Institute, Dept. of History, Free University, Berlin (Sept-Dec 2012 and April 2013)
• Visiting professor, Dept. Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest (Feb.-Mar. 2013): Gave Masters Class, “Telling Lives Now—New Uses of Life Narrative.” Lectures: Reading Life Narrative; Witnessing Lives: Testimony and Collective I’s; Autobiography and Automediality; Posthuman Lives: Re- or Dis-Locating the Human?; Online Lives.
2013-14 invited lectures:
• “Getting a Digital Life: Online Presentation and Autobiographical Lives,” with Sidonie Smith. Sarah Lawrence College, April 28, 2014.
• “Narrating Gendered Lives Now--Witnessing, Graphic Memoir, and Online Self- Representation,” English Institute, University of Wroclaw, Poland, April 9, 2013;
• “Exposed Lives? Privacy and Self-Presentation in Online Environments” (co-written with Sidonie Smith). Keynote speaker, seminar on “The Aesthetics of Privacy: Reading and Writing Under Conditions of Modernity,” organized by Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, and Venice International University, San Servolo (Venice), Italy, May 9, 2013.
2013-14 conference talks:
• “Graphic Memoir as Visual How-To: Bashi’s Nylon Road.” International Auto/Biography Association, Banff, Canada, May 30, 2014.
• “Graphic Memories of Revolution: Women on the Verge in the Middle East,” Session on Transnational Comics, Modern Language Association, Jan. 10, 2014.
• “Joe Sacco Covers Joe Sacco.” Session on “Graphic Lives in Wartime,” Div. Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing & Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives, Modern Language Association Convention, Jan. 4, 2013.
• “’The Right Voice’: Relational Autobiography and Celebrity Narrative in Patti Smith’s Just Kids.” 2013 Autobiography Across the Americas Conference, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, July 22-25, 2013.
Conference Respondent or Session Chair:
Queer Places, Practices, and Lives II Conference: Session Chair, “Locating Desire” Reading Queer Identity and Resistance across Space and Time,” OSU, May 16, 2014.
Comparison as Method lecture series, Comparative Studies: Respondent to Prof. Maria Cotéra, University of Michigan, OSU, Oct. 21, 2013.
Cartoon Festival Conference: Session Chair, “Autobiographical Comics.” Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, OSU, Nov. 14, 2013.
Professional service
Appointed to Advisory Board for Autobiography/Autofiction: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, 3 vols., ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2015. Vol. I: Theory and Concepts of Autobiography/Autofiction (560pp.); Vol. II: History of Autobiography/Autofiction (560pp.); Vol. III: Exemplary autobiographical/autofictional texts (750pp).
