91É«ÇéƬ

About the event

Despite its appearance in nearly every literary publication, little attention has been given to the role of the "supplementary" epitext of the biographical note as a vital source of authorial self-presentation. In this paper, we ask not only how individual authors configure aspects of identity through their bio notes, but how aggregated trends in bio notes index paradigmatic shifts in the legibility and authority of subjects under a regime of data-profiling. We present a quantitative analysis of author bio notes included in four Australian literary journals (Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant,Ìý²¹²Ô»å Voiceworks) from 2010 to 2025, mapping how authors have increasingly engaged with markers of embodiment and situatedness over time.  

While this shift in bio-note convention seems amenable to an inclusive politics of intersectionality, we propose a more critical conceptualisation of the subjectivity at play by engaging with what Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio call profilicity: a second-order conception of selfhood that is formed under the expectation of being observed, as when constructing a profile. Taking into account institutional forces that locate bio-notes in a broader matrix of cultural legibility and authority (including the influence of government funding mandates and editorial policy), we examine what bio-political forces might be informing this catalogical authorial performance, including the extent to which the increasingly explicit signalling of identity markers forms the authorial subject as a data assemblage within the covert surveillance of algorithmic culture. Along the way we offer a sample of some of the more playful, inventive, and compelling authorial postures.

Bio

Paul Dawson's latest book of poems is Lines of Desire (Puncher & Wattmann, 2025). His first book, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), was published before the School of the Arts and Media – where he lives and works in room 218 of the Robert Webster building – even existed. Paul has yet to win a major literary prize and his poems have been rejected from Australia's top literary journals, including Meanjin (dead to me), Southerly (who cares how old you are?), and Westerly (go ahead and secede). Paul has also published three academic monographs: The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State University Press, 2013), and Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). I am currently the poetry editor of Southerly, for which I have read a lot of bio notes. 

Mia Lo Russo always knew she wanted to misappropriate literary terminology. She now identifies as a data-driven storyteller. The work she has produced within the scope of her employment remains exclusive property of the Company and cannot be reproduced here, but she assures you it made some media industry executives very happy. She thanks the Commonwealth Government and 91É«ÇéƬ for her Research Training Program scholarship. It has allowed her to quit her full-time job analysing trends in the publishing industry using excel to be able to focus on research projects like this, which involve analysing trends in the publishing industry using excel. She no longer receives superannuation.