Carolyn Ellis

Carolyn Ellis is an interdisciplinary scholar and qualitative researcher, widely regarded as an originator and developer of autoethnography, a reflexive approach to research, writing, and storytelling that connects the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political. She is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida and an Honorary Professor at the Communication University of China. She served as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and is a founding member of the Ethnography Division in the National Communication Association and the Section on Emotions in the American Sociological Association. Among her publications are a documentary film, five monographs, six edited books, and more than 150 articles, book chapters, and essays on autoethnography, ethnography, compassionate and interactive interviewing, research ethics, death and dying, minor bodily stigmas, caregiving, intimate relationships, health and illness, and research with Holocaust survivors.

Ellis was born and raised in Luray, Virginia, a rural mountain community. Her mother, Katherine Ellis, was a homemaker and worked with her father, Arthur Ellis, Sr., who owned a construction company. Ellis’s interest in ethnography began when she read Erving Goffman's (1959) Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as an undergraduate sociology major at the College of William and Mary. For her undergraduate honor’s thesis she carried out an ethnographic study of an isolated fishing community. She continued this fieldwork while she was a graduate student in sociology at State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she received her Ph. D. in 1981. Her dissertation was a comparative study of two fishing villages, which was later published as Fisher Folk: Two Communities on Chesapeake Bay, winning the Robert E. Park Award in 1988 for outstanding research monograph from the American Sociological Association section on Communities and Urban Sociology.

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