Meet The Team!
Co-Creators: Dr. Orly Lael Netzer and Dr. Amanda Spallacci
Dr. Orly Lael Netzer studies life writing and ethics, practices of reading as bearing witness to creative forms of testimony, the politics of empathy as ethical recognition, and the colonial legacies and trajectories of testimony. She is the editor of Autobiography, Ethics, and Relations, has co-edited special issues of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and her work has been published in Canadian Literature, and Postcolonial Studies. Orly has also served as an editorial assistant for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and was a co-founding and organizing member of IABA’s Graduate Student and New Scholar Network (SNS).
Dr. Amanda Spallacci is a Killam Laureate and lecturer who researches a variety of discourses and narratives about sexual assault. She engages with numerous fields such as: autobiography theory, Black feminist theory, psychoanalysis, memory studies, and narrative/rhetorical studies. Her research and publications concern contemporary Hollywood cinema, television, print culture, feminist histories, and life writing through the lenses of memory studies, trauma, affect, and critical race theory. She has published on sexual assault in A/B Autobiography Studies (2017), Studies in Testimony (2019), Arts (2019), and various edited collections.
Research Assistant: Austen Lee
Alongside her role as Research Assistant with the Teaching Life Writing Project, Austen Lee provides support to the Canadian Literature Centre and the Parkland Institute. She holds a BA (Hons) in English and Creative Writing (University of Alberta, 2018) and a MA in English (U of A, 2020). As a graduate student, Austen studied life writing and worked on a personal memoir project. Her work has been published in Poetry is Dead, PRISM international, Grain, and elsewhere.