This micro-credential, which is limited to 8 graduate students, will meet in-person at the Beinecke Library in classroom 38-39.  Here are the dates of the 5 meetings:


Friday September 17
Friday October 1
Friday October 15
Friday October 29
Friday November 12

All meetings are from 11am to 1pm.  

"What is an Archive?", taught by Melissa Barton, Curator Yale Collection of American Literature, will explore archives in theory and practice, as both figurative and literal, both concrete and abstract, repository for “primary” inquiry into the past. Many fields have undergone “archival turns” in recent decades, and many cultural and performance theorists, critics, and historians have advanced arguments about “the archive” as a monolithic concept. Meanwhile, professional archivists regularly publish tweets, articles, and blog posts asking them to stop it. This micro-credential hopes to ponder the question: What is up with this?

We will consider theories of archives from cultural studies fields and the archival profession, and we will discuss how archives are made, how they are used, how they are made usable, what may be assumed or elided in the making and use of archives, and the popularity of, and tensions around, “the archive” as a concept. Topics and keywords include: what is primary or original? What is order or process? What does it mean to collect, to curate? What is an archival silence, and what might be comparable notions of archival noise? What does it mean to recover or discover? In addition to readings, students will complete a survey and processing plan of an existing collection at Beinecke Library or another Yale collection.

Over the course of the term the group will:
• Interrogate the conception of “the archive” or “an archive” in cultural, literary, and historiographical studies, and its relationship to the instantiation of archival collections at Yale University and elsewhere
• Understand how archives, especially collections of personal papers and the records of cultural organizations, have been acquired by institutional collections in the 20th and 21st centuries
• Understand how archives in institutional collections are arranged and described, including the principles of provenance, original order, hierarchy, and taxonomy (i.e., controlled vocabularies) that guide archival description
• Understand that archival principles and practices are not politically neutral and are not immune to structures of power; rather, archives have in themselves historically served as tools of state surveillance and violence. Archival principles and practices are embedded in and formative of structures, biases, and assumptions of human activity in the past and the present. Participants will understand, as well, some of the efforts made by archivists to combat these embedded power structures.

Guests include:
Lucy Mulroney, Associate Director for Collections, Research, and Education, Beinecke Library
Alison Clemens, Head of Processing, Yale Manuscripts and Archives
Others TBD

Out-of-session prep and project assignment:
• Required readings will be limited to 1-2 hours of advance preparation per session.

• Participants will create a survey and processing plan of a minimally processed, but shelved collection in Beinecke (or Manuscripts and Archives or another Yale repository). Participants will receive training and guidance in producing this document.
a. collection must be shelved with a published finding aid
b. collection should be minimally described *or* minimally arranged, a list of choices will be offered
c. students will survey a minimum of 10 boxes in the relevant repository reading room
d. students may choose a collection from the list or are welcome to propose a version of this project relevant to their own research
e. This project is expected to take 10-15 hours of dedicated time in a reading room. (Note that reading room hours are typically 9am-4:30pm.)