Archives

Undergraduate / Graduate

This doctoral seminar explores the theorical, epistemological, and methodological underpinnings of archival work and imagination, along with its poetics, politics and technologies. The course is designed for students already working with their own set of archival materials. During the quarter, we will attend to the problems that have guided modern archival thinking. We will see that archive/archiving often has a great deal to do with the production of traces and fragments, with impermanence and materiality, with the interplay of presence and absence, as well as milieus of power mediating between past and present. Beyond matters of truth and evidence, archives also entail inevitable questions of loss, memory, forgetting, repression, and desire. Drawing on a wide range of examples and theoretical literatures, we will examine how archival operations play out in a variety of media -- texts, film, photography, drawings, maps, objects, landscapes, and digital worlds - as well as the challenges and possibilities they contain."