Cirrus@Austlit

'This volume of essays was inspired by the increasing though still-limited body of scholarship connecting the writing of history directly with the lives of those who write it, and the contributions were initially presented as papers at an intensive workshop held at The Australian National University in July 2015. While the writing of historians’ lives by themselves or others is not new in itself – Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life and Writings, for example, appeared posthumously in 1796 – considerable discussion flowed during the 1980s and 1990s from the publication of Pierre Nora’s Essais d’ego-histoire.  The extent of subsequent developments is demonstrated in the seminal work in the English language – Jeremy Popkin’s History, Historians, & Autobiography – where the significant increase in historians’ autobiographies and associated discussion of the genre becomes evident.' (Introduction)