Category Archives: humanities

READ: On curating filing holes

Those working on the material text may be aware of the glorious new enterprise that is Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. Created and edited by Gill Partington, Adam Smyth and Simon Morris, the journal exists both as a lavish large format physical production and an online marvel. Two issues have […]

CFP: Feeling(s) in the Archive: Emotions, Expressions, Experience

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 […]

New article: Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies

New out in The American Historical Review (September 2021) is an article by Itza A. Carbajal and Michelle Caswell that explores how archivists and historians might come together in the digital realm. The authors argue that a more developed understanding of digital archival theory and practice can provide the basis for “doing digital history better“. ABSTRACT […]

Poets and Archives

An online event from the Institute of English Studies (School of Advanced Studies, University of London) for those in UK and compatible timezones. Tuesday 9 March 2021 Online | 18:00-19:15 GMT As museums, archives, and libraries adapt to a series of lockdowns, we have a stronger sense than ever of the challenges involved in providing […]

Poetry manuscripts: Two articles

Two recent articles from Alison Fraser, assistant curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo may of interest. Both focus in part on questions of materiality — the manuscript as ‘trash’ and the clipping. The articles are: ‘Creating the Twentieth-Century Literary Archives: A Short History of the Poetry Collection at the University at […]

Call for papers: Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Popular Culture

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 […]

Now in paperback: Spontaneous Particulars by Susan Howe

Good news that a paperback edition is coming in May 2020 of Susan Howe’s wonderful short book, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. Originally published in hardback by Christine Burgin Gallery in association with New Directions, this glorious tribute to the importance of being in the archive will hopefully now reach new readers. Spontaneous Particulars […]

Virtual exhibition: Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800

While the Beinecke Library like so many others is currently closed, it is possible to view online some of their exhibition, “Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800”. There is a beautifully detailed exhibition brochure and a series of videos on different aspects of the materials on display. You can download the Brochure for Subscribed at […]

NEW BOOK: On manuscripts, materiality and ‘thinking through paper’.

New out from Palgrave: Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we […]

New book: The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives

A very exciting new publication from Princeton University Press is Melanie Micir‘s, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives.  From the publisher’s website: “Melanie Micir explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s carefully annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes’s fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson’s […]