Narrative, identity and academic storytelling

Understanding narrative as the stories we tell about ourselves in our professional academic lives, I focus here on the genres which, most explicitly, allow us to do this. I want to explore how we construct representations of ourselves, what I shall call “identity narratives”, in three rather neglected academic genres where the requirements of anonymity and impersonality are more relaxed. In thesis acknowledgements, bio statements and personal webpages writers are released from formal conventions of disciplinary argument and have an opportunity to reveal something of how they want to be seen by others. The question arises, however, of how they use the opportunities these story-telling genres offer.