Researching and writing my two biographies required a great deal of thought on the nature of biography, and the challenges and opportunities that inform any attempt to fill gaps in the historical record.
My most extensive writing on the form appears in the 2021 volume Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities, and Provocations, which I co-edited with Donna Lee Brien and contributed to several chapters.
Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, ‘Speculative Openings’ Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities, and Provocations,, Routledge, 2021, 1-17.
Ffion Murphy with Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, ‘On the Threshold: Conceptual Speculation’, 58-71.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘The Speculative Method: scientific guesswork and magical speculums’, 39-55.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘The lost Wildflowers of “Wee Witchee Wee’.
My other work on speculative biography includes the following, including studies of AESI written as I was working on Wild Love, which were supported by my DECRA (ARC DECRA DE180100379):
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Resourceful Reinvention: Speculative biography as Public History’, in Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton (eds), Making Histories, Germany: Indira Chowdhury & Michael Frisch (de Gruyter). 2020. Chapter DOI: 10.1515/9783110636352-021
Kiera Lindsey, ‘A Short Time Before Her Death’, European Journal of Life Writing on ‘Life Writing and Death’, Volume IX (2020), 73-82.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Deliberate Freedom: Exploring the Role of informed imagination and speculation in historical biography’, TEXT Literary Journal: Special Issue: Troubled Lives, October 2018.
Speculative biography has also been a theme for several of my academic presentations:
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Speculative Biography as Creative History?’, University of Bristol, 27 May 2019.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Sighing for Australia: Adelaide Ironside and a colonial sorority abroad’, International Australian Studies Association, UQLD 3 – 6 December 2018.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Factually Informed Imaginatively Conceived: Case Study: Adelaide Ironside, Australian Historical Association Conference, 4 July 2018.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Speculating Upon Biography’: The Convict’s Daughter’, Creative Histories Now, History Now Seminar, UTS, September 2017.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Born to the Future, to the Future Lost’: Adelaide Ironside in Garibaldi’s Italy’, Australian Historical Association ‘Entangled Histories’ Conference, 6 July 2017.
Kiera Lindsey, ‘Engaging with the Archival Abyss: Slippery Sources, Speculative Biography & Creative History’, University of Technology Sydney, Public History Centre’s ‘Creative History Seminar series panel with Anna Funder and Gabrielle Carey, 8 June 2017.