Julia Watson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3652373 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julia Watson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julia |
| FAMILY NAME | Watson |
| SIGNATURE | WATSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3972-3006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Celebrating the 40th Anniversary Issue of a/b
Addiction to a bad idea, especially in low- and middle-income countries
Remembering the American Queen
In this relational vignette Watson recalls growing up in and around Detroit as Aretha Franklin and other great local singers, many with Motown, rose to prominence. Franklin’s style was informed not only by her childhood singing gospel songs in her father’s church but also by her musical passion and activist politics. Unable to attend any of the informal tributes in Detroit around Franklin’s memorial service because she was out of the country, Wat…
Drawing is The Best Medicine
Drawing is The Best MedicineSomatic Dis-ease and Graphic Revenge in Miriam Katin's Letting It Go Julia Watson (bio) I guess the Germans moved on and I didn't. — Miriam Katin, Letting It Go Comics memoirs have the "potential ... to open up new and troubled spaces," as Gillian Whitlock has observed (976). Miriam Katin's Letting It Go, an autobiographical comic published in 2013, opens up these spaces in spectacular fashion by telling a new story of…
Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory by Griselda Pollock
Reviewed by: Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory by Griselda Pollock Julia Watson (bio) Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory Griselda Pollock Yale University Press, 2018, 544 pp. ISBN 9780300100723, $60 hardcover. Eminent British art historian Griselda Pollock's study of Charlotte Salomon's vast visual-textual-musical work Leben? oder Theatre? (Life? or Theatre?) is unquestionably the most sustained, informative, and insightful wor…
Manthia Diawara’s Autoethnographic Forays in Memoir and Film from ‘Counter’ to ‘Strong’ to ‘Beyond’
In order to suggest the larger terms, parameters, and limits of autoethnographic method in life narrative, this essay explores three life narratives from filmmaker, writer, and critic Manthia Diawara that engage and exemplify different models of autoethnographic method, and points up the interests and issues raised by each. In the films Rouch in Reverse and An Opera of the World and the memoir/short film In Search of Africa, it makes distinctions…
The Afterlives of Those Who Write Themselves. Rethinking Autobiographical Archives
As those who write themselves, life narrators are readers, interpreters, and curators of the archival material, both intimate and impersonal, accrued during their lifetimes. These materials form an archival pre-life that is extended and complemented by posthumous remediations of their narrated lives. Personal archives may include writing in journals and diaries, digital exchanges on social media and blogs, documents, and images in photographs and…
Designing by Radical Indigenism
Looking to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites and traditional ecological knowledge-based infrastructures (Lo–TEK), we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. This article suggests that by hybridizing Lo–TEK with high-tech systems, the GIAHS sites could offer designers a toolkit towards economically, ecologically, culturally, and technologically innovative systems that can improve product…
Life? or Theatre? (Leben? oder Theater?) by Charlotte Salomon
What about False Witnessing?
Human rights testimonies, shaped and packaged into narratives of witness, educate and bind readers to the degree that they convince them of two things: that the story is the "real" story of a "real" survivor. That is, narrative joined to an embodied person; and that the reading experience constitutes a cross-cultural encounter positioning readers as ethical subjects within the global imaginary of human rights advocacy. Witness narratives communic…
Archiwa zapisów życia
Smith and Watson propose eight microstudies exploring the challenges of researching life writing. Their sources are familiar to Polish readers – Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipović, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the writings of Mary Antin or Charlotte Salomon’s autobiographical series of paintings. The authenticity of those works is examined in terms of the different perspectives of the artist, autocreation, human rights or the editing process, which give…
Remembering James Olney (1933-2015)
Remembering James Olney (1933–2015) John Eakin (bio), Cynthia Huff (bio), Sidonie Smith (bio), and Julia Watson (bio) james olney and the study of autobiography - john eakin Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté. —Charles Baudelaire James Olney’s death last winter set me to thinking about the past—thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago—back to a time before the creation of all the resources for the study of autobiography that we…
Patti Smith Kicks In the Walls of Memoir
In Just Kids, Patti Smith's relational narration “kicks in the wall” separating autobiography from biography. It alternately takes up the voices of a tender fairy tale of two young artists' quest for fame, an autoethnographic portrait of their cultural moment, and an autothanatographic tale of loss that seeks to “awake the dead.” Smith's performance makes clear that voice in memoir need not be monologic, as she moves between two subjectivities, n…
Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates
In taking up the vexed example of Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, I want to do two things: read it as in part a model of autoethnography organised by what Sidonie Smith and I have developed as ‘the metrics of authenticity’; and consider how such a narrative, read as strategic autoethnography, can be understood as a feminist project of—partially successful—self-representation to demystify patriarchal institutions. Although Santiago s…
The Pleasures of Reading in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Fun Home includes allusions to and graphic representations of several kinds of texts—masterworks of literary modernism and Realism, classics of homoerotic fiction and autobiography, coming-out narratives, as well as Bechdel's parents' letters and photographs, official documents, maps, and anatomical and architectural drawings. Juxtaposed in its frames as visual collage, they mediate between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and create a visual ‘archive o…
Witness or False Witness
One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore ho…
Visual Diary as Prosthetic Practice in Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings
British performance artist Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings , created over a decade during a struggle with mental illness for which she was institutionalized forty-one times, explores and images aspects of self-experience that have been marginalized in the humanist tradition of autobiography. Refracting her self-portraits through various forms of the inhuman-animal, vegetative, machine-she develops a tropology of visual images that "unmirror" self-re…
Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the comingout/ coming of age story of young Alison in an "artistic, autistic" family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel's graphing of subjectivity at…
As Gay and as Indian as They Chose
This essay illuminates multiple complexities in collaborative life writing through an analysis of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, a book in the form of a journal recounting colonial contact between whites and indigenous people prior to the 1910 United States appropriation of native lands in what is now far northwestern California. Arnold and Reed…
Ousmane Sembene
Ousmane Sembene:A Memorial Tribute Julia Watson When African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene died at 84 in Dakar, Senegal, on June 9, 2007, the world duly took note. Sembene had lived a remarkable life that spanned most of the twentieth century and beyond, and his ten feature films, four short films, five novels, and five collections of short stories engage the challenges and contradictions that have energized and often fractured our times. Sembene was…
Curradi, Taddeo
Curradi family
Ben Franklin, Protector of Americans Abroad
In 1985, as an assistant professor of English with a travel grant from the small college in upstate New York where I was then teaching, I took my almost-three-year-old son to Mexico City for the summer. My ambition, besides immersion in a sunny, warm metropolis, was that we would both learn some Spanish while exploring the city's splendid layers of culture. Looking back, I realize that we learned more than either of us could assimilate in our con…
Reading Autobiography
With the memoir boom, life storytelling has become ubiquitous and emerged as a distinct field of study. This book presents a critical introduction to life writing in all its forms. It aims to help with the reading and interpreting of autobiographical texts and presents various methods for this across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts. This edition lays out a sophisticated, theoretical approach to life writing and the…
Interfaces
Modern and contemporary women's artistic production of autobiography frequently occurs at the interfaces of image and text. The many permutations of words and images in all their modes of production--photograph, pose, invocation, written narrative, sculpture, dance, diatribe--create countless possibilities of expression, and this volume charts some of the ways in which women artists are seizing these possibilities.Editors Sidonie Smith and Julia …
The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography
Preface Our plenary presentation was a slide-lecture drawn from the introduction to our forthcoming edited collection, Interfaces: Women's Visual and Performance Autobiography. We began the Interfaces project several years ago, in response to the remarkable outpouring of self-portraiture in contemporary painting, photography, artists' books, and mixed visual forms such as installations, collage, and quilting that marked the last two decades of au…
Witness or False Witness
One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore ho…
Addiction to a bad idea, especially in low- and middle-income countries
Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the comingout/ coming of age story of young Alison in an "artistic, autistic" family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel's graphing of subjectivity at…
Drawing is The Best Medicine
Drawing is The Best MedicineSomatic Dis-ease and Graphic Revenge in Miriam Katin's Letting It Go Julia Watson (bio) I guess the Germans moved on and I didn't. — Miriam Katin, Letting It Go Comics memoirs have the "potential ... to open up new and troubled spaces," as Gillian Whitlock has observed (976). Miriam Katin's Letting It Go, an autobiographical comic published in 2013, opens up these spaces in spectacular fashion by telling a new story of…
Patti Smith Kicks In the Walls of Memoir
In Just Kids, Patti Smith's relational narration “kicks in the wall” separating autobiography from biography. It alternately takes up the voices of a tender fairy tale of two young artists' quest for fame, an autoethnographic portrait of their cultural moment, and an autothanatographic tale of loss that seeks to “awake the dead.” Smith's performance makes clear that voice in memoir need not be monologic, as she moves between two subjectivities, n…
Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates
In taking up the vexed example of Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, I want to do two things: read it as in part a model of autoethnography organised by what Sidonie Smith and I have developed as ‘the metrics of authenticity’; and consider how such a narrative, read as strategic autoethnography, can be understood as a feminist project of—partially successful—self-representation to demystify patriarchal institutions. Although Santiago s…
Autobiographical Signatures in New German Film
Current Interests, Work in Progress
Current Interests, Work in Progress
Autobiographical Signatures in New German Film
De/Colonizing the Subject
A diverse and widely inclusive collection of essays that frames the frontier of critical investigation - colonial and postcolonial autobiography of the embodied subject
Distinguo
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Women, Autobiography, Theory
Women, Autobiography, Theory is the first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women s autobiography, drawing into one volume the most significant theoretical discussions on women s life writing of the last two decades.The authoritative introduction by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson surveys writing about women s lives from the women s movement of the late 1960s to the present. It also relates theoretical positions in women s autobiograp…
Reading autobiography
The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography
Preface Our plenary presentation was a slide-lecture drawn from the introduction to our forthcoming edited collection, Interfaces: Women's Visual and Performance Autobiography. We began the Interfaces project several years ago, in response to the remarkable outpouring of self-portraiture in contemporary painting, photography, artists' books, and mixed visual forms such as installations, collage, and quilting that marked the last two decades of au…
Reading Autobiography
With the memoir boom, life storytelling has become ubiquitous and emerged as a distinct field of study. This book presents a critical introduction to life writing in all its forms. It aims to help with the reading and interpreting of autobiographical texts and presents various methods for this across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts. This edition lays out a sophisticated, theoretical approach to life writing and the…
Interfaces
Modern and contemporary women's artistic production of autobiography frequently occurs at the interfaces of image and text. The many permutations of words and images in all their modes of production--photograph, pose, invocation, written narrative, sculpture, dance, diatribe--create countless possibilities of expression, and this volume charts some of the ways in which women artists are seizing these possibilities.Editors Sidonie Smith and Julia …
Charlotte Salomon’s Memory Work in the “Postscript” to Life? or Theatre
Film Review
Curradi, Taddeo
Curradi family
Ben Franklin, Protector of Americans Abroad
In 1985, as an assistant professor of English with a travel grant from the small college in upstate New York where I was then teaching, I took my almost-three-year-old son to Mexico City for the summer. My ambition, besides immersion in a sunny, warm metropolis, was that we would both learn some Spanish while exploring the city's splendid layers of culture. Looking back, I realize that we learned more than either of us could assimilate in our con…
Ousmane Sembene
Ousmane Sembene:A Memorial Tribute Julia Watson When African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene died at 84 in Dakar, Senegal, on June 9, 2007, the world duly took note. Sembene had lived a remarkable life that spanned most of the twentieth century and beyond, and his ten feature films, four short films, five novels, and five collections of short stories engage the challenges and contradictions that have energized and often fractured our times. Sembene was…
Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the comingout/ coming of age story of young Alison in an "artistic, autistic" family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel's graphing of subjectivity at…
As Gay and as Indian as They Chose
This essay illuminates multiple complexities in collaborative life writing through an analysis of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, a book in the form of a journal recounting colonial contact between whites and indigenous people prior to the 1910 United States appropriation of native lands in what is now far northwestern California. Arnold and Reed…
The Pleasures of Reading in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Fun Home includes allusions to and graphic representations of several kinds of texts—masterworks of literary modernism and Realism, classics of homoerotic fiction and autobiography, coming-out narratives, as well as Bechdel's parents' letters and photographs, official documents, maps, and anatomical and architectural drawings. Juxtaposed in its frames as visual collage, they mediate between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and create a visual ‘archive o…
Witness or False Witness
One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore ho…
Visual Diary as Prosthetic Practice in Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings
British performance artist Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings , created over a decade during a struggle with mental illness for which she was institutionalized forty-one times, explores and images aspects of self-experience that have been marginalized in the humanist tradition of autobiography. Refracting her self-portraits through various forms of the inhuman-animal, vegetative, machine-she develops a tropology of visual images that "unmirror" self-re…
Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates
In taking up the vexed example of Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, I want to do two things: read it as in part a model of autoethnography organised by what Sidonie Smith and I have developed as ‘the metrics of authenticity’; and consider how such a narrative, read as strategic autoethnography, can be understood as a feminist project of—partially successful—self-representation to demystify patriarchal institutions. Although Santiago s…
Patti Smith Kicks In the Walls of Memoir
In Just Kids, Patti Smith's relational narration “kicks in the wall” separating autobiography from biography. It alternately takes up the voices of a tender fairy tale of two young artists' quest for fame, an autoethnographic portrait of their cultural moment, and an autothanatographic tale of loss that seeks to “awake the dead.” Smith's performance makes clear that voice in memoir need not be monologic, as she moves between two subjectivities, n…
Remembering James Olney (1933-2015)
Remembering James Olney (1933–2015) John Eakin (bio), Cynthia Huff (bio), Sidonie Smith (bio), and Julia Watson (bio) james olney and the study of autobiography - john eakin Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté. —Charles Baudelaire James Olney’s death last winter set me to thinking about the past—thirty, thirty-five, forty years ago—back to a time before the creation of all the resources for the study of autobiography that we…
What about False Witnessing?
Human rights testimonies, shaped and packaged into narratives of witness, educate and bind readers to the degree that they convince them of two things: that the story is the "real" story of a "real" survivor. That is, narrative joined to an embodied person; and that the reading experience constitutes a cross-cultural encounter positioning readers as ethical subjects within the global imaginary of human rights advocacy. Witness narratives communic…
Art (22 works) · History (19 works) · Literature (18 works) · Art history (14 works) · Political science (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Narrative (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Psychology (10 works)