The Spring 2022 meeting of Archival Kismet will be held virtually April 8-9, 2022. Its theme is “Feeling(s) in the Archive: Emotions, Expressions, Experience.” They particularly encourage scholars whose work deals with issues of emotion, affect, memory, and trauma in historical research, as well as proposals that reflect the emotional labour and experience of historical […]
Category Archives: Cultural Heritage
Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies – The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market
posted by mdever
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 […]
Definitely worth reading
posted by mdever
The following works tackle questions of materiality across different archival settings, including the impact of the digital on our understandings of materiality and archival engagements. Carrie Smith. The Page is Printed: Ted Hughes’s Creative Process. Liverpool University Press, 2021 This monograph offers the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process. Smith poses the questions: […]
New books!
posted by mdever
A quick round up of some new books: Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature by Paul Benzon Description: Technological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media […]
Reanimating Working-Class Writing
posted by mdever
In a special issue of Across the Disciplines entitled ‘Unsettling the Archives’, Jessica Pauszek contributes an article entitled Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation. In a section dedicated to ‘Bearing Witness in Unsettling Ways’, Pauszek traces how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried […]
Virtual unfolding: New digital techniques for opening complex documents
posted by mdever
An exciting breakthrough has been announced this week, one that permits researchers to read letters without unfolding them, offering new ways of managing sealed and fragile documents. Using a combination of X-rays and 3-D imagining techniques, researchers virtually “opened” four letters from the Brienne Collection, a trunk filled with 2,600 notes sent from Europe to the […]
Manuscript fragments: a webinar to catch up on
posted by mdever
The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has been running a lively set of lectures and panel discussions that are now available online for anyone slow to catch on or living in incompatible time zones. For those interested in manuscripts there is: A Fractured Inheritance: The Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities of Collecting Manuscript […]
Boxes: A Field Guide — Download this new book free
posted by mdever
Mattering Press has published this quirky book, Boxes: A Field Guide edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi. This is not a book that deals explicitly with archives, but it does raise some exciting questions about archival materiality, given we often first encounter archived papers via boxes. As the Mattering Press site observes: “This […]
Call for papers: Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Popular Culture
posted by mdever
Living in hopeful times, this appears to be a call for a real life gathering in 2021. The Popular Culture Association annual conference will be held June 2-5, 2021, at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, Massachusetts. The Libraries, Archives, and Museums area is soliciting papers dealing with any aspect of Popular Culture as it […]
New book: Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market
posted by mdever
Just out from the University of Massachusetts Press is Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market by Amy Hildreth Chen. This new work will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the political economy of literary archives and how the US market for writers’ papers developed in the second half of the twentieth century. […]
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