Conversation

Eating Disorders in Life Writing with Leslie Jamison

Fri, Nov 7, 2025

10:00 AM–5:00 PM

CUNY Graduate Center (Kelly Skylight Room). Free and open to all. Registration required.

Join us for this conference at the CUNY Graduate Center which will explore ethical questions of eating disorders in life writing with a keynote lecture by the writer Leslie Jamison.

Self-starvation, Patrick Anderson has argued, can be thought of as “an archival project of undoing and becoming”; Maud Ellmann expands, “ingestion and starvation are less opposed than they may seem, for both are destined to undo the self in the very process of confirming its identity.” Eating disorders, then, pose important questions for practitioners and theorists of life writing, that archival genre so concerned with the inscription and unraveling of individual identity.

Through paper presentations, round table discussions, and a keynote by author Leslie Jamison, this conference seeks to explore those questions — what problems does the representation of eating disorders raise for life writing? What do the archives of eating disorders uncover? What do eating disorders reveal about writing, about life? What are the ethical obligations of eating disorder memoirists to their often vulnerable readers?

Presented by the CUNY Graduate Center Biography & Memoir Program, the Center for the Humanities, the Women & Gender Studies MA Program, the English PhD Program, the Psychology Program, and the CUNY Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council (DGSC).