Carolyn Ellis (PhD, Stony Brook University) is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of South Florida. She has established an international reputation for her contributions to autoethnography and the narrative study of human life. Her awards include the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award, both from the National Communication Association (NCA); The Legacy Lifetime Award and best book and article awards from NCA’s Ethnography Division; a Lifetime Achievement Award in Qualitative Inquiry, and two best book awards from the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois; a Lifetime Achievement Award from The International Conference of Autoethnography in the UK; Charles Horton Cooley best book award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; Robert E. Park Award for outstanding research monograph from the American Sociological Association Section on Communities and Urban Sociology; and the Goodall and Trujillo Award for Narrative Ethnography.
Dr. Ellis has produced two films on Holocaust survivors and published eight monographs, seven edited books, and more than 150 articles, chapters, and essays, including the Handbook of Autoethnography; Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories; Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness; and The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography,
She has presented keynote addresses and facilitated workshops in sixteen countries at numerous institutions, including several sessions for the Qualitative Research Summer Intensive. She is a founder and co-editor of the Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives book series (Routledge) and takes an active role in the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative. Happily retired, she lives in Safety Harbor, Florida and Franklin, North Carolina with her partner Art Bochner and their rat terrier companion Malee.
