Session Abstract

Biography occupies a curious place within the historical profession. America’s reading public has long shown interest in the genre. Memoirs, life histories, and chronicles of renowned individuals regularly top the nation’s bestseller lists. Atop the ivory tower, however, biography often receives far less acclaim. To many historians, biography as a mode of historical inquiry is bourgeois and passé, a relic of the Victorian Era when only powerful, white men were consequential in the study of history. With their periodization set by the lifespan of their subjects, biographies supposedly amount to a historiography of one, unable to contribute to the study of social forces or cultural trends that transcend the individual.

This roundtable seeks to challenge this presupposition. Composed of five American religious historians who have worked in a biographical vein, we argue that biographical projects can not only make significant scholarly contributions, but uniquely so. This religious emphasis is both appropriate and timely. As one commentator has noted, religious history’s recent popularity within the profession has been accompanied—perhaps spurred—by a “boomlet” in religious biography. But a focus on religion also deconstructs the Victorian presumption that biography is the province of the powerful. As a subfield rooted in the study of the conversion narratives, mystical experiences, and personal testimonies of ordinary people, American religious history lends itself to and has been advanced by biographical inquiry.

As Rachel Wheeler and Chris Cantwell argue, biographical projects often uncover surprising historical, and historiographical, connections between communities, places, and ideas. For Cantwell it is a fundamentalist Sunday school teacher who joined the Socialist Party; for Wheeler it is an evangelical Mohican with an affinity for German piety. But for both, biography is the thread that weaves together historiographies scholars often treat discretely. In many ways, biography’s main strength is its ability to illuminate what broader studies obscure. To Edward Blum, for example, W. E. B. DuBois’ canonization as a secular saint in leftist studies has overlooked the inextricably religious nature of his ideas and their popularity. For Kathryn Lofton, America’s very infatuation with personal fame is a phenomenon best explored through the individual. As a genre, modern biography emerged alongside new senses of the self that were highly individuated and commercially inflected. In the end, everyone from an icon like Oprah to the lowliest evangelical preacher are subjects yearning for their biographies to be written.

Biography, then, is a mode of historical inquiry more than capable of yielding important scholarly insights. At the same time, it remains one of the most popular genres of historical scholarship. Matthew Sutton closes the roundtable by considering the tensions and opportunities that lay between academic inquiry and the reading public. His work on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson has, like McPherson herself, been widely recognized in many media outlets, and Sutton discusses the choices historians make in their work and their ramifications on reaching audiences outside the academy.

Through presentations and a robust conversation with the audience, the roundtable will explore, and hopefully help break the academic prejudice against, biographical methodologies.