After 20 years of supporting global original source research, the CLIR Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources program is coming to a close. To celebrate and reflect on this program, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is holding a capstone symposium and all-class reunion in St. Louis, Missouri and online May 24 (virtual) and May 26-28 (in-person), 2022. Fellows from all cohorts are invited to reflect on their research experiences and consider the future of global archival research.
Recorded Talks
New Approaches to Atlantic World Slavery
Panel and open discussion (Matthew Fox-Amato, Danielle Terrazas Williams, Scott Heerman): With a focus on the history and memory of Atlantic world slavery, this virtual roundtable explores new approaches to the archive. Panelists will talk about the research that went into their books. Dr. Danielle Terrazas Williams will discuss The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (Yale, 2022). Dr. Scott Heerman will talk about The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country (Penn, 2018). And Dr. Matthew Fox-Amato will discuss Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (OUP, 2019).
Small Altars: Ethnic Studies in California and a Living Disciplinary Archive
Ethnic Studies, along with Math and English, are now the three required courses students must take to graduate from a California Community College. This legislation has created a transformational opportunity that will affect 1.2 million students in the world’s largest public education system. To do so requires materials and sources. In a discipline like Ethnic Studies with essential activist and academic foundations, from where do these sources come? How will sources, materials and content in Ethnic Studies adapt as the discipline moves from a racialized endeavor to a mandatory graduation requirement? What is the meaning of legacy for creating a living disciplinary archive?
Exposed in the Shadow Archive
How do vernacular images as (audio)visual archives move and live their own lives?
This question is at the heart of my in-progress book project Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in China and Beyond. My paper suggests the overlooked importance of ephemeral media (newsreel, orphan film, amateur photos, vernacular images, etc), especially what’s called cinephmera, in archival work and in exposing revolutionary violence as image-based abuse. My paper historicizes the incriminating catalogue genre (a cluster of ephemeral artifacts/materials with which people were all familiar in socialist China but that did not have a coherent way of naming it and that has never been treated as a genre or theorized): the systematically listed and ordered collection of “bad subjects” as evidence displayed for the purpose of public shaming and punishment. The paper is an excerpt about my auto-ethnographic encounters with images in both archival and recycled forms during fieldwork as well as a methodological self-reflection on found footage as archive. The paper reveals the role of found footage as key to a testing ground for approaching the lost, the silenced, and the forgotten. Such exploration also enables new archival accesses and redefines the audiovisual archive itself.
Archiving Dance in and After a Pandemic
During my fellowship (2017-2018), I conducted research in London and New York City archives with significant dance collections – a rewarding experience that shaped every chapter of my dissertation. In this presentation, I will discuss how, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, archives that were critical for my research faced threats of institutional restructuring and other pressures. Yet as it placed new strains on dance archives, the pandemic also prompted contemporary dance artists to generate new digital content and participate in archival projects that may enrich the historical record moving forward.
Conversation between Mark Dimunation and Abby Smith Rumsey
A conversation on the history and legacy of the CLIR Mellon Dissertation Fellowship program with writer and historian Abby Smith Rumsey and Mark Dimunation, Chief, Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. Rumsey was the original program coordinator who helped create the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship program back in 2001-2002. Dimunation is a longtime mentor for the program who has reviewed applications and worked with fellows for all 20 years of the program's history. They are interviewed by Stephanie Stillo, Curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Graphic Arts Collection at the Library of Congress. Stillo is an alumni of the dissertation fellowship program and in recent years has served as a program mentor. They will discuss why the program was created, how the program and archive-based scholarship has evolved over the past 20 years, and some of their favorite moments from the program.
Objects of Desire
What originally began as a dissertation questioning the construction of medieval “courtly art” in modern art historical scholarship has now evolved into a project exploring medieval gift exchange and the role of material objects in thematizing and focusing erotic love in medieval art and literature. This much more fruitful direction (pun intended) was profoundly influenced by the in-person examination of my primary object of study, the thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Old French poem “The Romance of the Pear.” In this manuscript’s text and images, the poet and his lady exchange a series of increasingly abstract gifts, beginning with the titular pear and followed by a ring, a kiss, a headscarf, the lovers’ hearts, and finally, the manuscript itself. My own experience of the manuscript’s unusually small, intimate size and the physical traces of past viewers’ obsessive touching of specific illustrations are key pieces of evidence that shaped my thinking in important ways, as my conference paper will explain. My paper will also briefly address the profound impact that the recent explosion of high-resolution digital facsimiles and 3D renderings—increasingly made available by institutions around the world— has had on my research and especially my teaching of medieval art.
Information Resources
My 2003 CLIR report addressed the questions that the digital revolution raises at a time when use of the Internet was surging. My subsequent work as an editor of RILM (Répertoire Internationale de Littérature Musicale), a global online music bibliography that covers all fields of music, has been a journey through the far-reaching changes that globalization and digitalization have imposed on academic research in the last twenty years. RILM was conceived in 1966 as a global research tool modeled after the UNESCO idea, and its wide scope was ahead of its time. How has this model fared in the era of digital globalization
Teaching Physical Archival Research in the Digital Age
Over the past five years I have had the opportunity to advise dozens of short archival research projects using the collection of the Musiksammlung at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, Austria, the primary archive where I completed my CLIR Mellon Fellowship. Despite the prevalence of freely available digital archival materials, when confronted with original sources such as manuscripts in a well-known composer’s hand, medieval sacred chant books, or annotations filling the margins of étude books, students have expressed excitement and engagement that goes far beyond anything that occurs in a traditional classroom, or while examining digital documents. In this essay I offer some suggestions on working with college students on archival projects, as well as speculations on the benefits of encouraging active use of physical archives by modern students. Students who live vast portions of their lives online can benefit as much as, if not more than, earlier generations by studying physical archival documents. Encounters with original sources can increase comprehension, excitement, and creativity for students longing for educational experiences that create a feeling of authenticity.
Teaching Physical Archival Research in the Digital Age
Research at the National Archives in College Park, MD, the United Nations Archives in New York, and the Social Welfare History Archives in Minneapolis, MN fundamentally altered the research questions at the heart of my project. I had initially planned to examine the history of Korean War adoptees, but upon reaching the archives I quickly learned that my project would also be about Korean women and birth mothers, and mixed-race Korean children.
Serendipity in and beyond the Archive
Most scholars can point to a paper they never intended to write–one that resulted from a serendipitous “find” in an archive during research for something else entirely. This is one of the most fruitful and fun aspects of archival research: the unexpected avenues pursued only because we stumbled upon interesting material in an adjacent shelfmark or because a skilled archivist pointed us toward a dusty box we’d never have found on our own. Much of this serendipity is lost as we conduct more and more of our research online using digitized source databases. In this paper, I will explore ways of achieving serendipity in virtual primary source research when in-person research is impossible, whether due to funding constraints or the Covid-19 pandemic.