“Biography is with its one leg in the academia and with the other in the public arena...”

Interview with Professor Hans Renders about the crossroads of historical biography, oral history, and microhistory.

Abstract

Hans Renders is a Professor of History and Biography Theory, and the director of the Biography Institute at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He was a member of the founding committee of the Biographers International Organization (BIO). He has written biographies of the Dutch poet Jan Hanlo (1998), Dutch journalist and author Jan Campert (2004) and Dutch artist, painter, writer, poet, and architect Theo van Doesburg (2022). He is the editor of the Biographical Studies series at Brill. He has published studies on biography in various international journals and edited Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (with Binne de Haan, Brill, 2014), The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (with Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma, Routledge, 2017), and Fear of Theory: Towards a New Theoretical Justification of Biography (with David Veltman, Brill, 2021). With Nigel Hamilton, he published in 2018 The ABC of Modern Biography. Jana Wohlmuth Markupová spoke with Hans Renders in Groningen in September 2023.