Overview

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood is a collection of essays in which life writing scholars theorize their early-career, mid-career, and late-career experiences with the documents that shape their professional lives as women: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion applications, publication and conference bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to compete for opportunities and resources. The essays explore the privacy laws, peer review, disciplinary standards, digital media, and other standardizing tools, practices and policies that impact women’s self-construction at pivotal junctures at which they promote themselves in the spaces of academic careers.

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9781032146805

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Reviews

“The essays in Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood cast light on the exhausting demand that women squeeze their lives into the metrics of academic success. By highlighting how forms that purport to quantify and document women’s academic success obscure their actual lives and labor, they map out the pitfalls of translating life into career narratives that structurally disadvantage women. Against the mandatory uses of life writing in institutional forms of evaluation, the writers develop feminist and intersectional ways to make their work count otherwise.” --Leigh Gilmore, author of The #Me Too Effect (2023) and the newly rereleased The Limits of Autobiography (2023) “The auto/biographical essays in this provocative collection document the persistence of stifling patriarchal norms and forms in the western academy. More importantly, they also document the many shrewd stratagems women faculty on three continents have devised to subvert “the official story” the patriarchal academy decrees. Kudos to Ortiz-Vilarelle and her penetrating colleagues!” --Joycelyn Moody, Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio and editor of A History of African American Autobiography (2021). “Across the span of their careers, academic women are required to produce narratives of their professional lives, their quantifiable scholarly achievements, research agendas, teaching philosophies, service histories, future plans. They now find themselves curating academic self-presentations across a number of digital platforms. These are narrated lives constrained by professional and institutional norms. In this edgy, provocative collection, Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood: In the Spaces Provided, Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle presents women academics mobilizing scholarly knowledge of autobiography studies, feminist theory, critical race studies, and ethnography to probe the sociocultural politics of evaluative self-narration and -promotion within the neoliberal university, with its enduring masculinist and racialized model of belonging and success. Sometimes focus turns to critique of suffocating expectations of self-narration in standardized modes, the tenure dossier, the academic CV. Sometimes emphasis falls on the agentic forging of alternative practices of self-presentation in counter-forms and media, among them academic selfie, collaborative narration, and curation of autobiographical objects in women’s offices. Collectively, these forays into autotheory and autoethnography ground the larger message, for all professional women, about the politics of stultifying norms and the joys of everyday autobiographical practices that acknowledge and incorporate material, expressive, multimedial, poetic, and collective means of knowing oneself in often inhospitable spaces.” --Sidonie Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, USA and Director of the Institute for Humanities.

Author Information

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. Her work appears in Life Writing, European Journal of Life Writing, Persona Studies, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She was the 2021-22 Fulbright Research Chair of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada. Her book, Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator (2020) is published with Routledge Press in its Auto/biography Studies Series. Her current project, tentatively titled Life’s Work: Career Narrative as Autobiography in the North American Academy, is a study of functional forms of life writing in academic careers. She serves as Editor in Chief of a/b: Auto/biography Studies.

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