Archives in Our Times

Archives are essential cultural infrastructure. From oral stories to hand inscribed annotations in books, from letters sent around the world to recipes kept at home, from clothing worn as part of a community to pamphlets for community advocacy, archives hold our collective memories. The changing federal priorities have shifted how we think of these resources. To help us understand why archives matter, this panel will discuss:

- How archives are accessed and used to advance research

- How archives are used differently by different humanities disciplines

- The curation and selection of objects to be included and those excluded from archives

- How archives serve communities and why

Please join our panelists in a conversation about the many ways archives can be used to advance our research and promote understanding of cultures. 

Panelists:

Jonathan Hope, Professor, Department of English. Jonathan Hope's research work combines linguistics and literature, using techniques from linguistics to explore literary texts, and literary texts as evidence for the history of the English language. Most recently he has used techniques from Digital Humanities and corpus linguistics to debunk the common claim that Shakespeare invented thousands of words: “Who Invented 'Gloomy'? Lies People Want to Believe about Shakespeare” (Memoria di Shakespeare) — and you can see him talking to our 2019 Homecoming festival about 'gloomy' and 'swagger' here.

Hope is recognized for his digital humanities work: he was director of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Early Modern Digital Agendas, a series of advanced summer institutes held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

At ASU he has taught graduate-level classes in Digital Humanities, Experimental Writing, and Scholarly Writing. At undergraduate level, he has taught Shakespeare, Pre-1800 Literature, and Introduction to Literary Studies.

Mark Tebeau, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. An urban, public, and digital historian, Mark Tebeau has directed more than two dozen digital humanities, oral history, and public history projects.  Along with co-editors Serge Noiret and Gerben Zaagsma, he recently authored A Handbook of Digital Public History (De Gruyter Oldenbourg.) In Fall 2022, Tebeau served as the first "Public Historian in Residence" at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg.

Tebeau leads the development of Curatescape a framework for mobile publishing that seeks to make open-source and/or low-cost hosted mobile tools available to scholars and curators. With funding from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, Curatescape is being used by more than 100 cultural organizations, universities, and heritage preservation organizations to curate landscapes and museums. 

Alexander Soto (Tohono O’odham Nation) is director of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University (ASU) Library. Under his leadership, the Labriola Center has developed and implemented culturally responsive library services, expanded its personnel seven-fold, and reestablished its physical locations as culturally safe spaces for Indigenous library users. Alex co-authored ASU Library’s first land acknowledgement statement, is the recipient of the Society of American Archivists 2022 Archival Innovator Award, and recently was awarded a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “Firekeepers: Building Archival Data Sovereignty through Indigenous Memory Keeping,” a three-year project to preserve Indigenous knowledge through community-based participatory archival partnerships with Arizona’s Tribal communities. He also is the treasurer for the Arizona Humanities Board of Directors and is an American Indian Library Association executive board member. Alex's journey to librarianship comes after years of success as a touring hip-hop musician and activist.

Rachel Corbman, Assistant Professor, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. Rachel Corbman is a historian of U.S. feminist and queer social movements in the late twentieth century. She specializes in the intellectual history of these movements. Her first book, "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation," is under contract with the Theory Q series at Duke University Press. Recognized by the CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies fellowship award (2017) and the Ralph Henry Gabriel dissertation prize (2019, honorable mention), "Conferencing on the Edge" tells the story of five academic conferences with notable citational afterlives in feminist and queer studies. Her second book project, "Before Crip Theory," is a history of disability activism in the long women's liberation movement. Her research has been published (or is forthcoming) in peer-reviewed journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Feminist Theory, Feminist Formations, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Continuum: Journal in Media and Cultural Studies, and Historie social/Social History. 

• For in-person attendees, light refreshments and drinks will be provided.
• For online attendees, the event will be live-streamed on ASU Live.

For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/events