What is a Colonial Archive?
Yale University
9-10 November 2023
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/yc5t7fff
Organizers
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Assistant Professor, English
Lucy Mulroney, Director of Collections, Research, and Education, Beinecke Library
Ayesha Ramachandran, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
Erika Valdivieso, Assistant Professor, Classics
Overview
“What is a Colonial Archive” is a two-day participatory symposium centered on the challenges of collecting, stewarding, displaying, researching in, and teaching with materials entangled with colonialism’s myriad histories. Bringing together collections experts and scholars from around the world, we explore the ways in which we can reckon with ethical and practical dilemmas in working with materials whose preservation, loss, and ongoing relevance are tied to historic and current imperial agendas as well as new collaborations being forged across institutions, disciplines, and nations. Speaking to recent and evolving expectations which have emerged for the institutions that acquire cultural heritage materials, the researchers who articulate historical claims based on these collections, and the teachers who utilize cultural heritage collections as pedagogical tools, this symposium aims to build towards collaborative frameworks that might guide future teaching, research, and stewardship efforts. To this end, participants will be asked to reflect on their own relationship to colonial archives–in both professional and personal terms–and to imagine what steps we might take collectively to shape self-conscious, ethically-alert responses.
AGENDA
THURSDAY: November 9
1:00 - 2:15 Agenda Setting Session (HQ 276)
Chair: Lucy Mulroney, Director of Collections, Research and Education, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Anjali Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Erna Lilje, Curator of Indigenous Knowledge and Material Culture, Research Center for Material Culture, Netherlands
Ricardo Padrón, Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia
Karin Wulf, Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at John Carter Brown Library, Brown University
2:00-2:45 Break
3:00 - 5:30 Hands-on Workshop: Thinking with Materials (Beinecke Library Rm 38/39)
Devin Fitzgerald, Lecturer in History, and Associate Research Fellow, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Karin Wulf, Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at John Carter Brown Library, Brown University
FRIDAY: November 10
8:30-9:00 Breakfast
9:00-10:45 Panel: Curation, History, and Sovereignty
Chair: Nick Jones, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University
Pedro Pereira, Associate Professor of Portuguese, The Ohio State University
Sonia Das, Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, New York University
Samba Yonga, Founder and Head Communications Strategist at Ku-Atenga Media, and Co-founder of Museum of Women’s history in Zambia
Royce Young Wolf, Curator of Native American Art at Yale University Art Gallery, and Manager of Native American holdings at Yale Peabody Museum
11-12.15 Roundtable: Ethics of Collecting
Chair: Cheryl Beredo, Associate Director of Collections, Research, and Education, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Tarren Andrews, Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, Yale University
Melissa Grafe, Librarian for Medical History and Head of Yale University Medical Historical Library
Kevin Repp, Curator of Modern European Books and Manuscripts, Beinecke Library, Yale University
12.15-1.45 Lunch
1.45-3 Roundtable: Ethics of Research
Chair: Erika Valdivieso, Assistant Professor, Classics
Sandra Enimil, Program Director for Scholarly Communication and Information Policy, Yale University Library
Kathryn James, Rare Book Librarian at Yale Lillian Goldman Law Library
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics, Princeton University
Lisa Voigt, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University
3.15-3.30 Closing Remarks
Ayesha Ramachandran, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Yale University