Autosociobiography, a term coined by nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux, is recognised as a productive literary phenomenon at the intersection of literary representation, social analysis and political commentary. A volume of the same name, edited by three colleagues from the Institutes of Dutch, English and Romance Languages and Literatures of the Freie Universität Berlin, traces the global entanglements of autosociobiographical texts, especially the historical, social and transcultural dynamics they discuss, represent and perform. The contributions to Autosociobiography critically engage with the question of how to expand the scope of autosociobiography beyond its current corpus and class narratives to include other forms of social exclusion and stratification.

Michail Leivadiotis (Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"), in his contribution "Reversing Class Defection. Two Ionian Tales of Gender, Nation, and Woe", examines cultural hybridity and postcolonial tensions in two Ionian nineteenth century autobiographies. Martinegou's struggle with gender and class limitations and Lountzis's ambivalence between cosmopolitan and national self-understanding are analysed as inverted versions of autosociobiography. Class discomfort and temporal perspectives reflected in the self-fashioning narratives of the local aristocracy allow for methodological reflection on the stretch of a literary term still in development.

Johanna Bundschuh-van Duikeren, Marie Jacquier and Peter Löffelbein are the editors of the open access volume Autosociobiography: Global Entanglements of a Literary Phenomenon (transcript 2025), the result of an eponymous workshop funded by the EXC 2020.