Call for Papers:
Eating Disorders in Life Writing

The Program in Biography and Memoir, CUNY
New York, NY

November 7, 2025

Deadline for Submissions: June 7, 2025

Self-starvation, Patrick Anderson has argued, can be thought of as “an archival project of undoing and becoming”; Maud Ellmann expands, “ingestion and starvation are less opposed than they may seem, for both are destined to undo the self in the very process of confirming its identity.” Eating disorders, then, pose important questions for practitioners and theorists of life writing, that archival genre so concerned with the inscription and unraveling of individual identity. This conference seeks to explore those questions — what problems does the representation of eating disorders raise for life writing? What do the archives of eating disorders uncover? What do eating disorders reveal about writing, about life? What are the ethical obligations of eating disorder memoirists to their often vulnerable readers?

We invite submissions of papers for presentation, addressing the intersection of eating disorders and life writing. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words outlining the paper to be presented, as well as a brief biography. Please email mracklin@gradcenter.cuny.edu and ausmapalmer@gmail.com with any questions. We are interested in academic approaches and the perspectives of writers — if you are unsure whether to submit a proposal or unfamiliar with the conference submission process, please email us.

Possible topics include:
- The representation of the banality and boredom brought on by repetitive disordered behaviors/practices
- The ethical and artistic representation of disordered eating behaviors
- Critiques of stereotypical gendered and cultural representations of eating disorders
- Eating disorder memoir/life writing from marginalized/underrepresented groups
- The (de)construction of the (auto)biographical self through eating practices and body projects
- Formal strategies for representing eating disorders
- Problems of plot in eating disorder narratives and critiques of the conventional, cliched recovery arc
- Analyses of disordered eating in the work of a particular writer (e.g., Louise Glück, Annie Ernaux)