Aimée Morrison, writing at Hook & Eye, raises an interesting point about writing academic bios:

One thing that’s increasingly becoming clear to me is that the bios that accompany Serious Scholarly Writing, like a peer-reviewed article, don’t mention teaching.

Better more words devoted to where you’ve published and who funded your work, than to describe what you teach in the graduate (or, heavens! the undergraduate) program at your institution.

She outlines some excellent possibilities (plus some great mock author bios) and has generated some useful discussion in the comments. I highly recommend that you read the full post: Hook and Eye: Do you care what I teach?.

Writing a bio is emotionally difficult.

It feels arrogant. Worse yet, it is often very difficult to identify your skills, talents, and general specialness.

This is one of the places where your values can most obviously clash with the dominant values of the discipline, your institution, or academia in general.

Like Aimée, you might decide you just need to play the game. You bring all your textual analysis skills to the table, collect your data points, and compose a bio that feels like it fits with the genre and meets expectations.

And it feels icky.

Because it is icky to play a status game that is not aligned with your own values.

What exactly are you promoting?

As icky as we might find it, and many of us find it very icky indeed, self-promotion is a necessary skill.

One of the hardest parts about self-promotion is figuring out what you have to promote.

Things you are particularly good at feel natural to you. Your intimate knowledge of your research area seems banal or obvious.

And it makes you realize that you value different things about yourself and your work, than are generally valued in the culture.

This is particularly obvious if, like Aimée, teaching is something valuable to you. But the specific thing this task throws up for you may be different.

How to self-promote with less ick

No-one is going to discover your talent. Or, rather, the only way they are going to discover your talent is by reading these bios, looking up your published work, talking to people who have worked with you, etc etc.

One way to approach this is to approach the task like you would for any friend’s achievements.
And there is a clue: achievements.

You are not promoting yourself. You are promoting the work.

work is important. Not because it gives you status, but in itself.

• What is the work you do?
• Where can people find your work, so they can engage with it if it interests them?
• How has your work been recognized by peers or institutions?

You don’t have to play the status games. You don’t have to think about whether your work makes you important. You do important work. Promote that.

Then your decision for any particular venue is “Which work is most relevant to contextualize this thing?”
And if teaching is important to you, include teaching.

The people who will be unimpressed are not your people. Your people will be interested to see the whole you.

Related Posts:

Confidence must come from within

Confidence Tricks

Spotlight On: Imposter Syndrome

This post was originally written in 2011. It has been substantially revised and updated for republishing in 2024 with Related Posts added. Added to the Spotlight On: Confidence in March 2024.