Know me, know my work?
IHE linked to posts by Charli Carpenter and Daniel Drezner about using biographical notes for self-reflexive positioning--"a norm of full disclosure," to use Prof. Carpenter's terms, in which authors situate their scholarship in a context that goes beyond the purely academic. Prof. Drezner points out that "book prefaces" and "teaching statements" are generally the place to find such narratives (although book prefaces are frequently more Biographia Literaria than anything else). I feel hesitant about such autobiographical moves, for the following reasons:
1) As some commenters at Prof. Carpenter's site pointed out, there are real limitations on what people can divulge without fear of professional or personal reprisals. Once you say "well, of course you don't need to reveal Sensitive Detail X" then you've already given away the game, because Unrevealed Sensitive Detail X may be why the project was done in the first place. However...
2) ...the turn to autobiography strikes me as overly deterministic. Scholarly interests have a bad habit of being accidental--e.g., you wrote about Postpostmodern Bizarre Novel Y in that MA seminar on "Postpostmodern Bizarre Novels in Twenty-First Century Upstate New York" and got hooked for life.
3) Even when projects do have clear autobiographical antecedents, it may not be clear to the author what those antecedents are. This is the kind of autobiographical insight that often arrives only years after the fact (which is why teaching statements can be...non-insightful).
4) If my scholarship on the Victorian obsession with the Reformation is convincing, then it's convincing. If it isn't, then it isn't. Knowing that I'm a short Jewish associate professor in her late thirties with two cats, one house, zero children, and 6517 books is not exactly germane to assessing my understanding of the relevant primary and secondary texts.
5) In fact, I would have to say that--like biographical readings of literary texts--such self-positioning confuses verifiable facts with the subjective experience thereof. I'm Jewish, yes--most people named "Miriam Elizabeth Burstein" are, as it happens--but how do I experience that Jewishness? Is there any intelligent way in which I can say that being not only Jewish, but also a particular kind of Jew at a particular moment in history in a particular part of the world, has led me to write about...historical novels about the Reformation? Do I even know the answer to that question? (See #3.) To what extent am I an idiosyncratic, eccentric, or otherwise odd Jew, in ways that may be invisible to both myself and others? Or is my Jewishness, which some people would think was absolutely relevant to my writing about Victorian Christians, entirely marginal? If so, who is right? Can't I just be interested in something for no particular reason, other than "it's interesting"?
(Then again, I await with "great interest" [as letters to the editors so often begin] the writer who declares that "My article on 'The Lacanian Interpretation of Love Triangles in Early Twenty-First Century Anglophone Daytime Soap Operas' emerged from my pressing need to get tenure at my current institution, and has absolutely nothing to do with what I actually think about love triangles in early twenty-first century Anglophone daytime soap operas.")