About the Biography Institute

Biographies have risen in popularity significantly in recent years. Amongst the signs of this increased popularity is the growing number of biographies that have been published as a dissertation. As a response to this development this resulted in the establishment of the Biography Institute within the University of Groningen in 2004 and the Department History and Theory of Biography in 2012.

The Biography Institute has the following objectives:

• to offer both a supportive infrastructure and more specific support related to a variety of subjects for graduate students engaged in biographical research,
• to stimulate the further development of a theoretical framework with regard to the biography as an academic genre.

The Biography Institute aims to achieve the latter objective by organising academic conferences and symposia and by the publication of biographies, conference papers and academic articles.

Apart from conference papers the series Tweede leven (Second Life) is being published. In this series, for which the Biography Institute acts as an editor, standard setting biographies, both foreign and Dutch, are being reprinted.