Connecting the 19th century: archival correspondence in Special Collections

A Special Collections Event in collaboration with LAHRI.

Connecting the 19^th century: archival correspondence in Special Collections

Bedford Room

Special Collections Research Centre

Monday 4^th December 3.00pm – 4.00pm

Background

Special Collections holds thousands of letters written during the 19th century, many by significant artists, writers, politicians and activists. Others are from people who are less well-known today, but may have been famous in their lifetime or intimately connected with more famous friends.

Archival correspondence can offer significant insights into the lives of individuals, their works and working practices, and their professional and private networks. Diasporic by their nature, letters can help us to understand the migration of ideas across countries and continents. Re-unified, they invite us to move away from what Ahnert and Raamsdonk have called the ‘siloed analyses of individuals’, and to gain a greater understanding about projects and movements that develop collaboratively.

Correspondence can also help us to understand more about our collections: how they were acquired and shaped. Letters from archive creators and collectors can illuminate how historic acquisitions of material have privileged certain individuals and groups while excluding others. They illuminate gaps and invite us to critique our collections and collecting strategies.

Event Brief

Several recent projects in Special Collections have scoped new approaches to archival correspondence, including the reunification of tranches of material held across institutions, and mass-digitisation. Recent cataloguing work has made more collections available, and a legacy letters database offers possibilities for data visualisations or data mining approaches.

Special Collections would like to work with academic partners to develop new interdisciplinary projects in this area and to help identify the correspondence collections that will most benefit current research.

This speculative event will facilitate discussion on questions and ideas including:

• How do researchers want to access and use archival correspondence now?
• The materiality of correspondence
• Digital humanities approaches to the archive
• Re-unifying correspondence. National and international collaboration
• Interrogating, decolonising and diversifying collections and collections policies

We have a limited number of places for this launch.