Wendy Moffat
Dickinson College
Wendy Moffat is Curley Chair of Global Education, and Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, where she teaches 19th and 20th century literature, biography, and narrative theory. Her biography of E.M. Forster, A Great Unrecorded History (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010) won the Biographer’s Club Prize in the UK and was runner up for the Bograd/PEN Biography prize. An ACLS Fellowship in 2016 afforded her time to research and write Wounded Minds (forthcoming from FSG).
What does biography have to teach us in the current CLIMATE of anti-education, anti-liberal arts, anti-knowledge production? What is the place for writing biographies in the face of these pressures? Can we resist narratives... [ view full abstract ]
What does biography have to teach us in the current CLIMATE of anti-education, anti-liberal arts, anti-knowledge production? What is the place for writing biographies in the face of these pressures? Can we resist narratives of the heroic individual, and should we, at a time when educational and progressive institutions are under broad attack? Should we instead tell stories of the past through the lens of non-exceptional lives when even the knowledge of experts is undervalued in so many national-political realms? And what of the different climates within which the lives we tell took place? What of the climates of our storytelling? In the nineteenth century, authors, critics, and readers believed that biography could shape character. Is this still true? Do we wish it to be? Biography, its methods, and its receptions thus become test cases for thinking about the pressures facing humanistic scholarship more broadly. Variously embroiled in the cultural contradictions of the long nineteenth century, each of these papers poses aspects of these critical inquiries.
Wendy Moffat’s Wounded Minds, her forthcoming biography of two American pioneers-- the psychiatrist Thomas Salmon and the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant--contains both a story and its erasure. Salmon and Sergeant witnessed, treated, and experienced the trauma of “war neuroses” (what we call PTSD) in France in World War I, but returned to an America dedicated to collective amnesia and “normalcy.” Their fierce advocacy reshaped cultural conceptions of mental illness, forged “veteran” as a recognized social identity, and afforded government paid mental health treatment for tens of thousands of ex-soldiers. No one today has heard of them. Using her historiography of these lives as a case study, Moffat’s paper, “Prophetic Biography,” argues that the practice of biography is a singularly important tool now: a cracked looking glass that opens new affective vistas, and offers cultural models of resistance from the past.
