Life Writing in the sense of narratives of the self or of other people”€™s lives has been a central component of American literature and culture since colonial times. A multi-faceted body of literature has emerged from a variety of reports on personal experiences and private narratives, such as letters, diaries, biographies, memoirs and private records of local events, travelogues, conversion, captivity, and slave narratives or spiritual autobiographies.Older research approaches have treated Life Writing under the collective term of autobiography and have interpreted this body of texts as testimonies of assimilation or as expressions of a specific prototype of “€œAmericanness.”€ Recent research on texts from the colonial era to the present emphasizes transcultural and transnational aspects as central motifs and topics of Life Writing, which open the field to a broad range of records of experiences that come both from the center and the margins of mainstream culture, such as life narratives of women, ethnic groups and migrants. The widespread use of Life Writing in literary and cultural studies renders the difference between high and popular literature increasingly problematic and ultimately requires a broader conceptualization of (auto)biographical literature.Contrary to older, essentialist conceptualizations of Americanness, this collaborative research group applies a dynamic concept of identity formation and looks at various technologies of the self within a global context and, in doing so, pays particular attention to the play of differences among ethnicities, migrants and other marginalized groups and subjects. The dissertations on Life Writing analyze processes of transculturation within and beyond national borders.The doctoral college Life Writing is supported by the initiative “Pro Geistes- Wissenschaft 2015″.