‘Life Writing Has Moved from the Periphery to the Center’: In Conversation With Alfred Hornung
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.15.43831Keywords:
interviewAbstract
Alfred Hornung is well known for his work in American Studies, Life Writing, and intercultural connections with China. He has been a guest professor at many different Asian, American, Canadian, and European universities. Alfred is one of the co-founders of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) and IABA-Europe. He has been a professor for American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, since 1988 and established the Obama Institute there. His publications include Obama and Transnational American Studies, Ecology and Life Writing, and “Chinese Antecedents of Life Writing and the Western Genre.” This interview is from August 2026, just as Alfred was finishing his co-edited publication Handbook of Life Writing and discovers what Alfred thinks of the future of life writing scholarship, how life writing has changed with modern technology, and what kind of research he would like to work on in the future.
Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2026 Katrin Bingham, Alfred Hornung

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
