Archives, Power & Information

Center for Humanities & Information

Conceptions of “the archive” are central to scholarship across the humanities. Much of the critical work on archives shows how they are not merely repositories of information, but cultural sites of power. Yet how might we interrogate the “information” of archives as much as we do their power? We will take up this question through reading that engages thinking across the humanities as well as archival studies.

An Archives & the Archive — Feb. 1, 12:30-2, 124 Sparks

Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 9-25.

Theimer, Kate. “What Is the Meaning of Archives 2.0?” The American Archivist, vol. 74, no. 1, 2011, pp. 58-68.

Caswell, Michelle. “‘The Archive’ Is Not An Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies,” reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016.

Archives, Rhetoric & Power — Feb. 22, 12:30-2, 124 Sparks

Biesecker, Barbara A. “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 9, no. 1, 2006, pp. 124-131.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, pp. 87-109.

Sutherland, Tonia. “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2017.

Queering Archives — March 22, 12:30-2, 463 Burrowes

Arondekar, Anjali, Ann Cvetkovich, Christina B. Hanhardt, Regina Kunzel, Tavia Nyong’o, Juana María Rodríguez, Susan Stryker, Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici. “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion,” Radical History Review, vol. 2015, no. 122, 2015, pp. 211-231.

Arondekar, Anjali. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 10-27.

Rawson, K.J. “The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, 2018, pp. 327-351.

Archival Genres & Technologies — April 5, 12:30-2, 463 Burrowes

Eichhorn, Kate. “Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, vol. 12, 2008.

Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature, vol. 85, no. 4, 2013, pp. 661-688.

Punzalan, Ricardo L., Diana E. Marsh, and Kyla Cools. “Beyond Clicks, Likes, and Downloads: Identifying Meaningful Impacts for Digitized Ethnographic Archives,” Archivaria, vol. 84, 2017, pp. 61-102.