Biography across the Digitized Globe

David Veltman, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Groningen and he and works as collection specialist at the Special Collections department, University Library of Groningen, the Netherlands.Daniel R. Meister, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University and an Archivist (Private Sector Records) at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, in Canada.

“Biography Across the Digitized Globe contains many excellent essays both nuanced and provocative. […] [It] has been well-edited with a vivid portrait of Hans Renders in the Foreword and a concise Introduction that nicely sets the table. […] This festschrift is itself a microhistory of debates that has preoccupied academia since the late 1960s. A professorial conflict between a traditional form of biography and a more diverse, socially committed approach to documenting individual lives mirrors larger, often fiercer ideological debates in both the social sciences and humanities.”-D. L. LeMahieu, Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois, in Life Writing, 24 Jul 2025The expertly edited “Biography Across the Digitized Globe” is a kind of battle for recognition of biographers and their subjects that AI may tend to usurp but that cannot be silenced so long as biographers, like Mr. Renders, continue to pursue the genre on the frontlines of all media. - Carl Rollyson, 4 April 2025 in The New York Sun

• ContentsForeword: a Celebration of Professor Hans RendersAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Turn Every Electronic Page? Biographers Confront the Digital TurnDavid Veltman and Daniel R. MeisterPart 1: Theory – Transnational Microhistory1 Microhistorical Approaches and Playing with the Scales of History: a Microbiography of Historians’ Biographical MethodsMelanie Nolan2 Microhistory and Everyday Life Experience in a Biographical Writing: Representation in HistorySigurður Gylfi Magnússon3 The Scandalous Abbé Rioust: the Multiple Careers of an Exiled (Ex-)Priest in the Era of RevolutionsJeffrey Tyssens4 Transnationally Informed Biography: Finding Abraham Kuyper in the Dissemination of a South African Christian-NationalistJacques PienaarPart 2: Archives – Bits and Traces5 Twisting: Loss, Illness, and Dying in WordsWhat I Have Taken from Hans RendersMarlene Kadar6 Facts and Signs of Life: Bits, Biographies, Life Writing, Biobits, and the EnvironmentCraig Howes7 “Creating Science from One’s Own Biography”: Networks and Clues in the Archival Afterlife of Helmuth PlessnerDavid Veltman8 Traces and Clues in a Fairytale: Research Based on a “Weird” Historical SourceJana Wohlmuth MarkupováPart 3: Practice – Teaching and Writing Biography9 The Golden Age Is Over: AI and the Future of BiographyNigel Hamilton10 Dissecting “A Funny Thing”: Taste, Biography, and the Case of Nanne TepperLodewijk Verduin11 In Retrospective: the Concept of Subject Agency According to Virginia Woolf’s “The New Biography”Maryam ThirriardConclusion: Biography across Borders: Broadening Biography StudiesDaniel R. MeisterIndex