Biography
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Julia Flynn Siler
Director, Jeniam Conversations; OCLW Visiting Scholar
Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and a public historian working at the intersection of life-writing, biography, and archival research.
Her three books of narrative nonfiction explore overlooked stories of power, displacement, and cultural transformation: The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty (Penguin, 2007), Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), and The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Knopf, 2019), which won the Golden Poppy Award and was a finalist for the California Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, National Geographic, and the Washington Post.
Siler’s current project, GREENLAND BOUND: Polar Pioneer Louise Arner Boyd and the Price of Being First, is a biography of Louise Arner Boyd, a mid-twentieth-century American geographer, a California heiress and polar explorer. It follows Boyd’s transformation from socialite polar bear hunter to pioneering Arctic scientist to WWII spy, with the 1941 mission as its climax— and investigates how women’s scientific knowledge gets erased and what that costs us. She is also contributing a chapter on Boyd to the serial Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, which will be published this spring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).
A former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Europe and BusinessWeek in London, Siler has appeared as a commentator on BBC, CNBC, NPR, and PBS American Masters. She serves as Co-Director of Nonfiction/Memoir Programming for the Community of Writers in California and founded Jeniam Conversations, a public literary series at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She was an Oxford Next Horizons Scholar (Harris Manchester College and Rhodes House, 2025) and is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award (2016-2017).
At Oxford she is exploring how biography can illuminate questions of displacement, archival silence, and erasure.
Research Interests
women’s history, biography, literary nonfiction, archival research