History and biography, Friday 8 March 2013
Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London

10.30 Registration and welcome

11.00 New approaches to biography: from Lives and Letters to Life-Writing

Chair: Frank Prochaska (University of Oxford)
Ray Monk (Southampton/AHRC Research Network), Challenges to biography
Hermione Lee (Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, Oxford), The art of biography?
Meg Jensen (Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston University), Biography (and biographers) in theory and in practice
Max Saunders (Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London), Life-writing, autobiography and fiction

12.30 Lunch

1.30 The historian as biographical subject

Chair: Lawrence Goldman (St Peter’s College, Oxford/Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Adam Sisman, A J P Taylor and Hugh Trevor Roper
Fred Inglis (Warwick), R G Collingwood
Jonathan Haslam (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), E H Carr
Michael Bentley (St Andrew’s), Herbert Butterfield

3.00 Refreshments

3.30 The art of historical biography

Chair: Elisabeth Kehoe (Institute of Historical Research)
June Purvis (Portsmouth), Writing a biography of a woman who made history
Mark Ormrod (York), Positively medieval? Writing the life of Edward III
Jane Ridley (Buckingham), Must royal biography be ‘mythological’

5.00 Plenary roundtable discussion

Chair: Daniel Snowman (Institute of Historical Research)
Antonia Fraser, Roy Foster (Hertford College, Oxford), Andrew Lownie (The Biographers’ Club)

6.00 Conference reception