Conference: Researcher meets Curator (Maastricht, 22 March 2019)
28 februari 2019
As a historical and literary genre, the biography has gone through a metamorphosis over the past decades. Until fairly recently, its usual shape consisted of a chronological narrative, from the cradle to the grave, fixed mostly on a more or less autonomous development of the person being described. That has changed significantly: not only is the strict adherence to chronology no longer a given, biographies increasingly focus on a particular aspect of a person’s life. Alternatively, historians seek to investigate someone’s life as part of a wider historical question, be it cultural, economic, or social. And finally, the very term “biography” is often being used in a much broader sense: we see biographies not only of people, but also of objects, geographical features, and even events.