Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies

Anna Poletti

Associate Professor of English Language and Culture

Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Language and Culture. Anna’s research focus is contemporary life writing, with particular interests in youth cultures, ephemera (both digital and analogue) and the role of mediation and materiality in autobiography. Drawing on feminist and queer theory traditions, Anna’s published work examines how the materiality of media forms – from handmade postcards, to the selfie – inform the presentation of stories from lived experience.

Anna is co-editor (with Julie Rak) of Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (University of Wisconsin Press) and co-author, with Kate Douglas, of Life Narrative and Youth Cultures: Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Anna’s latest book, Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book (New York University Press, 2020) argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter. It discusses contemporary art, cardboard boxes, selfies, documentary film, zines, and transmedial crowdsourced autobiographical projects.

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