Talks
In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing Symposium
For centuries, women artists have produced autobiographical accounts of their lives and careers, using diaries, letters and other types of writing as a means of resistance, reflection, and self-fashioning. Taking a broad geographical approach, this symposium will address how women artists, between 1900 and the present, navigate their artistic identities through writing.
Dr Terri Ochiagha
"A Purple Testament of Bleeding War: On the Art of Biography and the Poetics of Silence".
Tue 17 March
Robinson College
In this lecture, Dr Terri Ochiagha embraces the idea of biography not just as a portrait, but as a composite work of art. She believes that such orientation requires the commitment to truth—inasmuch as the truth of a life can be retrieved—to coexist with the commitment to beauty. It also requires sensitivity and elegance in capturing the terrifying force of the experiences and thoughts that succumb the abyss of silence.
In her lecture, she will reflect on these questions by examining some of the compositional decisions that have governed her own particular ‘purple testament of bleeding war,’ to borrow William Shakespeare’s memorable phrase, in my civil war chapter of the biography of Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013) Terri is working at the moment.
Dr Terri Ochiagha is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh, a Resident Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University and world-leading scholar on the Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe. She is currently working on his first full-length biography, Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads, which will be published by Princeton University Press, and the edited volume Achebe in Context, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Her research on the Achebe biography is funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Foundation has just selected her as a resident in its prestigious Bellagio Center program. Last year, she was McMillan-Stewart Fellow at Harvard, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
Apart from her work on Achebe, Dr Ochiagha is also an influential scholar of elite colonial education in British Africa, and—outside of the area of African Studies—of the art of biography more broadly. In late 2024, she was a lead judge of the James Tait Black Prize in Biography, Britain’s oldest award in biography, and she will be writing a book on the aesthetics of biography for Princeton University Press after the conclusion of her Achebe biography.
Cost: Free to attend
Enquiries and booking
Please note that booking is required for this event.
Enquiries: Development Office, Robinson College Website Email: development-office@robinson.cam.ac.uk