Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies – The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market

Posted by mdever on December 29, 2021 in archives, archivists, critical archival studies, Cultural Heritage, intellectual property, letters, libraries, literary heritage, literature, manuscripts, preservation, public lecture

Coming up on 21 January 2022 is the Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies presented this year by Amy Hildreth Chen, author of Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market (University of Massachusetts UP, 2020). She will be speaking on the topic of “The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market”.

Abstract for the lecture:

The sale of authors’ papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin to Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. In Placing Papers, published with University of Massachusetts Press in 2020, Amy Hildreth Chen described the history of how this multimillion-dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considered what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others had on this burgeoning economy. In her Kenneth Karmiole in Archival Studies Lecture, Chen will revisit the demographic data and trends she analyzed in her monograph from the writers listed in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2007) before expanding her discussion with new data highlighting the unique circumstances faced by the authors of color listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014) and the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010). Chen will conclude with a meditation on the future of the market, including the quandaries that archivists, authors, dealers, and researchers of all backgrounds must face.

The lecture is offered as an online webinar and details for booking can be found here.

The lecture is a UCLA Department of Information Studies Colloquium Event.

POSTSCRIPT: The lecture can now be viewed here.