Anna Franz

Anna Franz is a medievalist (PhD Toronto, 2009) turned generalist librarian (MLIS Wayne State, 2012) who thinks about and engages with primary source pedagogy at the library, campus, and national scale. At Beinecke Library she works with faculty to plan and deliver course-integrated instruction with collection materials, mostly but not exclusively for only a single class visit. She has a particular depth of experience with classes that cross disciplines and curatorial areas. As founder and convener of the Primary Source Instruction Discussion Group she helps both form community among the curators, archivists, librarians, and museum educators who teach from Yale’s cultural heritage collections, and shape how that teaching happens. Nationally, she serves on the Instruction and Outreach Committee of the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

In her own practice she continues to grow into her commitment to critical pedagogy, consistently guiding students into considerations of silences, provenance, collecting practices, and the impact of library workers and others on collections and materials. Likewise, she regularly educates herself on the myriad ways white supremacy shows up in collections and classrooms.