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Presenter: Andrea Kaston Tange

Most of us know our ancestors only through fading bits of paper: sepia photographs or family recipes, public records, the occasional packet of letters. What does it take to build coherent stories out of such tantalizing fragments of lives? This workshop explores research and writing strategies for constructing family memoirs, drawing on examples from a project set in Miami in the 1920s.

Andrea Kaston Tange is a Professor of English at Macalester University.  She has published widely on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, including articles in edited collections and in top-tier journals (such as Victorian Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature). She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary work with a focus on material culture and daily lives.

Her first book—Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes (University of Toronto Press, 2010)—was very well reviewed. She subsequently developed and co-edited a four-volume collection of primary documents on children and empire for Routledge press. Her most recent articles have centered on visual images and ephemera, and she has been branching out into public writing, including a piece on Victorian Christmas cards in Slate and several on Victorian photography for The Conversation.

Her current projects include a monograph—Imagined Encounters: Public Impressions and Private Lives in the Age of Empire—under revision for a major university press and a book-length work of narrative nonfiction that got its start when she inherited her great-grandmother's 1926 diary.