In Academic Lives, Cynthia Franklin mounts a bold and passionate argument about the cultural politics of the contemporary turn to memoir by faculty in the humanities. Academic Lives is at once a nuanced exploration of the heterogeneous genres of the autobiographical and their capacities to attach or unhinge the personal and individualizing to the structural and political; a sustained engagement with everyday struggles over identities, politics, and knowledges on campuses across the United States; and a meditation on the stakes of contemporary moves to 're-humanize' the academic humanities after decades of theoretical critique. Brilliantly mobilizing close readings of memoirs and of campus events, Franklin parses the intersecting domains of the theoretical, experiential, ethical, and activist in the university today.

—Sidonie Smith, coauthor of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives

Tracing the rise of academic memoir to anxieties about the status of cultural theory, Academic Lives gives the genre the critical recognition and comprehensive survey it deserves. Cynthia Franklin is unsparing in her critique of the academic memoir’s tendency to substitute individual feeling for institutional analysis, but her ultimate goal is to show the genre’s potential for reshaping the humanities and public intellectual discourse. Academic Lives is indispensable reading not only for those interested in memoir but for those interested in the future of the university.

—Ann Cvetkovich, author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures

Franklin reads several celebrated academics’ memoirs with an eye to the fit between the explicit politics of the authors’ critical and theoretical writing and the implicit politics of their life writing. Her incisive and insightful analysis puts the idea that the personal is political to an original and illuminating test.

—G. Thomas Couser, author of Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing