Spring 2025 IAS Creative & Research Collaborative: Interrogating Archives Working Group

These workshops are designed to allow participants to engage with an object, broadly speaking, and to use that object to think about/interrogate the notions of archive in their research areas.

The first sets of two-part workshops will each begin with a convener, Marguerite Ragnow from the James Ford Bell Library and Lois Hendrickson and Emily Beck at the Wangensteen Historical Library, will be selecting and presenting an object with the group in advance.

At the first meeting will come prepared to help build an “archive” around the feature object by selecting something (this may be an image, a text, a thing, that they may or not have physically—it can be from their scholarship or experiences, etc.) that they think resonates in some way with the workshop presenter’s object and bring it with them to the workshop. They can share a link or copy if it is not a physical object or they do not have it in their possession. We will explore as a group the conversations (the archive so to speak) that we have created, including discussions of secondary literature relevant to the topics that this new archive and our conversations around it bring up.

For the second meeting, participants will review some of the materials that others brought to the first meeting and discuss what it means to bring these materials into conversation with each other. This process will allow us to think through our own work with other scholars whose research interests may differ, but who share an interest in how archives are constructed, what questions we can ask of and in archives and how we might contribute to or change current scholarly conversations around archives.

We will also have one-day workshops with visiting scholars, Jana L. Dambrogio (MIT Libraries: Letterlocking) and Monica Green (premodern pandemics and history of medicine), who will work with the group in the collections in the Twin Cities.

The last workshop with Michelle Hamilton will involve meeting to discuss an object and then a final experiential workshop at the Campus Club focused on the history of the margarita.

See the full schedule here! Please RSVP for events. For information regarding one-day workshops please contact [email protected].