Overview

This volume is dedicated to Professor Hans Renders, founder of the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Throughout his academic career, Renders witnessed a reflexive turn in historical research: biographers became more open about the limitations of their sources, and the subjective nature of their selection. Over this same period, however, the availability of digital sources has increased exponentially, which has profound implications for biographical research and the transnational framework used to approach the genre. Through its thirteen thought-provoking essays, this work seeks to make an intervention in Biography Studies by bringing the well-developed reflexive tradition to bear on the pressing challenge of proliferating digitized sources. After publication of this volume, Gabriella Kelly-Davies, in her podcast Biographers in Conversation, held an interview with Hans Renders, David Veltman and Daniel Meister about the book. Listen to this episode.

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Table of Contents

Reviews

“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 2025 The 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

Author Information

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.

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