The impulse to biography has often had a national base, and in its conventional forms biography has tended to serve national interests. Yet lives - occupations, networks, relationships, families, households, and the intimate - have eluded national borders in multiple ways that this conference seeks to explore. Mobility has been a central factor of modernity, facilitated by technologies of transport and communication and by modern notions of improving and changing the self. The structures of colonialism, indentured, convict and migrant labour, globalising economies, transnational cultural media - including film and theatre, higher education and professional training, have all contributed to lives that transcend the national.

What difference does it make to biography and to history to think of lives as transnational? What conceptual work do we have to do to think about lives as transnational? What makes a life transnational? What is the significance of the local in a transnational life? What possibilities does biography present for the writing of global histories? Can the history of diaspora be written via collective life stories? What historical developments, such as the passport, have forced life stories into national boundaries?

We invite papers from a variety of disciplines and media that address the conceptual challenges, practical difficulties and intellectual possibilities of telling transnational life stories. Possible session themes include:

- The politics of life stories.
- The local and the transnational.
- Elite and subordinate selves.
- Empire and intimacy.
- Domesticity and family in mobile lives.
- Modernity and the transnational.
- Transnational, cosmopolitan, global, international, diasporic?
- Practical research problems and solutions.
- Audience and publication.
- Biographical dictionaries in a global world.
- Ethics, private lives and ethics committees.