Biography Studies4 across the Digitized Globe

This volume is dedicated to Professor Hans Renders, director of the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen. In this collection of thirteen thought-provoking essays, Renders’s international colleagues discuss the challenges of digitization for the writing of biography. This volume is dedicated to Professor Hans Renders, founder of the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Throughout his academic career, Renders witnessed a reflexive turn in historical research: biographers became more open about the limitations of their sources, and the subjective nature of their selection. Over this same period, however, the availability of digital sources has increased exponentially, which has profound implications for biographical research and the transnational framework used to approach the genre. Through its thirteen thought-provoking essays, this work seeks to make an intervention in Biography Studies by bringing the well-developed reflexive tradition to bear on the pressing challenge of proliferating digitized sources. After publication of this volume, Gabriella Kelly-Davies, in her podcast Biographers in Conversation, held an interview with Hans Renders, David Veltman and Daniel Meister about the book. Listen to this episode.