Crossing Borders: Transnational Perspectives Life-Writing & Ego-Documents

Crossing Borders brings together researchers exploring how life-writing and ego-documents (diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies) capture the lived experiences of migration, exile, multilingualism, and cultural transition. The conference highlights how personal narratives illuminate transnational movement, identity formation, and encounters across borders, languages, and empires.

Topics addressed across the programme include:

• Refugee and exile correspondence
• Multilingual ego-documents
• Transimperial and colonial life‑writing
• Migration, memory, and diasporic self‑representation
• Cross‑border family, intellectual, and cultural networks
• Autobiographical writing shaped by political upheaval, conflict, or displacement

With case studies spanning Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, the event showcases the global and thematic range of life‑writing scholarship.

This conference welcomes scholars at all career stages, especially postgraduate students and early career researchers working on life-writing, ego-documents, migration studies, memory studies, cultural history, linguistics, and related fields.

There will also be a Keynote lecture at 17:30 on the same day by Professor Eva Kovács of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute which will be ticketed separately.

Full programme and Eventbrite for the evening keynote lecture to follow in due course.

We are grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association, the German Historical Society, and the Leo Baeck Institute London for funding this event.

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Host or Publisher EHRI-UK