Tag Archives: archival research

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 […]

Definitely worth reading

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!

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 […]

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 […]

Colloquium: Information Studies at UCLA

One of the small upsides of the pandemic has been the move to offer research seminars online via Zoom. What were once small gatherings advertised to a local few are now events available (time zones permitting) to interested scholars globally. For those who can line up with Pacific Time (PT), the offerings for the Department […]

Archives: new special issue of ‘Anglia’

Anglia: Journal of English Philology has published a special themed issue on Archives, volume 138, issue 3 (2020). First published in 1878 Anglia claims to be the oldest journal of English Studies in existence. The Archives issue was guest edited by Daniel Stein. Stein’s wide ranging introductory essay provides both an engaging survey of “the […]

New book: Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]