7th Annual V.V. Iofe Biographic Readings “The Right to a Name: Biography of the 20th Century”

The reading is sponsored jointly by the office of the Memorial Research and Information Center in St. Petersburg and the European University in Saint Petersburg with the participation of the Memorial International Society, The Center of Independent Sociological Research, and the Polish Consulate General in St. Petersburg.

The annual international Veniamin Iofe Biographic Readings is the only interdisciplinary seminar on biographics of the 20th century in Russia. Participants are invited from various fields of methodology and practice involved in researching and creating biographies; including history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, culturology, literary critics, and others.

Main Themes of the 7th Annual Readings:
-Contemporary biographical research: New approaches and possibilities, new methods in portrayal and presentation of biographies
-Problem of resources: reliability of resources in interpretation of life events
-Biography and myth, reservations in biography: content that doesn’t make it into biographies
-Posthumous biography: death in biography, biography and memory; disappearance as a fact of biography, forced disappearances
-Research of autobiographies
-And other topics

Preliminary format of the Readings: 20 minute presentation, 20 minute discussion.
Materials (texts of presentations) are published annually in a separate anthology.

The organizers will be unable to compensate participants for travel and living expenses in St. Petersburg during the conference.

Abstracts (maximum 2,000 signs) accompanied by a short CV (maximum 200 signs including blanks and stating contact address, title, position, education and research interests) should be sent by 1 April 2009 to the following addresses: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Working language of the conference will be in Russian.

Date of Conference: 20-22 April 2009
Location: European University in Saint Petersburg, White Hall

Conference Director: Irina Flige, Director of the Memorial Research and Information Center (St. Petersburg).
Co-Director: Boris Belenkin, Director of the Memorial Research and Information Center (Moscow).
Conference Coordinator: Tatyana Kossinova, Memorial staff. (mailto: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).