Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood

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.

Introduction: The Unlikely Autobiography of Women’s Career Documentation

LISA ORTIZ-VILARELLE

1 Vitae Statistics: The Anti-Autobiographical Imperative of Academic Self-Documentation

AIMEE MORRISON

2 Docile Bodies (of Work): Coaxing the Neoliberal Academic via the Online Researcher Profile

EMMA MAGUIRE

3 Sign ‘In the Space Provided’: Academic Email Signatures as Sites of Narrative, Branding, and Refusal?

MAY FRIEDMAN AND JENNIFER POOLE

4 Messing with the Metrics and Setting Our Own Standards: Academic Women’s Efforts to Reframe Success

ALISON L. BLACK, SANDRA ELSOM, AND VICKI SCHRIEVER

5 ‘Making Spreadsheets Won’t Get You Tenure’: Autoethnography, Women Administrative Faculty, and the Genres That Make Them (In)Visible

CANDIS BOND

6 ‘Not Another ARC Summer’: Grant Applications and Life Narratives of Motherhood

KATE DOUGLAS

7 Academic Motherhood and the Complex Banalities of a Curriculum Vitae

LEENA KÄOSAAR

8 Getting an Academic Life: The Untranslatable, or How to Curate a Polish-Canadian CV

EVA C. KARPINSKI

9 Crossing the Lines: Using Personnel File Documents to Negotiate Embodied Space

CYNTHIA HUFF

10 How a Lifetime of Academic Administration Gave Me the Freedom to Write a Sisterlocking Academic Memoir: An Interview with Valerie Lee

VALERIE LEE WITH JULIA WATSON

11 The Poetic Cover Letter: On Crafting Paradoxical Personas

VICKI HALLETT

12 Mothers and Myths: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Account of Navigating Domestic Academic Life

VANESSA MARR AND JESS MORIARTY

13 Post-it as Praxis: Counternarrating Non-linearity and Multiplicity in Academic Lives

ELIZABETH RODRIGUES AND MARION WOLFE

14 Dossiers in Crip Time: Reclaiming a Space for Crazy in the Academy

ALLY DAY

15 The Same Self/ie: Blurring Academic, Creative, and Personal Identity through the Taking and Sharing of Self-Portraits

MARINA DELLER

16 Spilling Out of the Spaces Provided: How Occupying the Academic Office Becomes an Autobiographical Act

LAURA BEARD AND LISA ORTIZ-VILARELLE