The collaborative seminar will introduce students at three different universities to various emergent approaches to thinking about "the archive" - that is, in the broadest sense, records of the past - and to question how some knowledges about the past get preserved and some repressed. We will organize our syllabus around topics and interdisciplinary approaches that are of interest to students in a wide range of fields including history, public history and museum studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, literature and cultural studies, critical legal studies, gender studies, and film studies.
We will introduce students to the general topic of "interrogating the archive," but we will draw on a few specific examples of archives so as to give students a hands-on experience and the possibility of developing a focused research project. The archives on which we will focus include written personal narratives (such as memoirs and letters), visual/oral interviews (e.g. the Visual History Archive), and political tribunal testimonies. These selections are based on types of inquiry that have been the focus of research projects for the co-instructors;
we will use these exemplary archives to address a wide range of cross-disciplinary questions that are applicable to many innovative approaches to the archive. We will also encourage students to pursue their own archive-related projects in the seminar. In addition, we will take advantage of our three geographic sites to investigate one additional approach to the archive - namely, a comparative analysis of cities as "sites of history." We will look at how history has been concretized in our cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Helsinki, Bochum) in comparison with literature on other select case-studies (such as Berlin, New York, Shanghai or Johannesburg). We will examine urban spaces, sites of historical commemoration and debates over them, and urban museums and public history projects. We will also look at the various types of migrations and diasporas that have brought people to and from these cities throughout history and how these diasporic histories are documented/archived/memorialized (or not).
This seminar will involve some site-specific sessions and some simultaneous teaching on two or three sites. We will coordinate a seminar for graduate students on each of our campuses and at times connect our students with each other through video/internet technologies. We will invite students from the fall collaborative seminar to submit papers based on their own interrogations of the archive for a research conference to be held at the University of Minnesota in Spring, 2019.