Introduction

This introduction contextualizes academic women's autotheoretical engagement with career documentation in academia as a critique of the spaces provided – or claimed – for women's professional self-construction in the academy. It attends to the range of functional forms of customary and uncustomary autobiographical modalities that the field of life writing studies is primed to examine more fully: online researcher profiles, email signatures, rubrics, autoethnographies, grant applications, institutional documentation software, CVs, personnel files, memoirs, cover letters, the feminist fairytale, Post-it notes, the research and teaching statements of tenure dossiers, selfies, social media platforms, and office space.