Paper Trails

*The event will take place in the Garwood Lecture Theatre, South Wing Wilkins, UCL*

Often there is more than research inside the books we read. Bookmarks, train tickets, receipts, and menus tucked into pages offer clues about the life of the book itself. Yet the lives of our research material often go unmarked, lost between the gaps in disciplinary boundaries and narrow definitions.

The biographies of books and documents can illuminate their contexts, as printed matter that is sold, passed down or abandoned. What happens when we consider the three moments of production, transmission, and reception together with our own research stories? Documents, like people, have births, lives, and even deaths, so what does it mean to investigate the biographies of texts, objects, and archival records? Beyond the formal roles of cataloguing and archiving, what part do researchers play in shaping the emergent archive?

This is not strictly an intellectual history, nor even a material book history, but something more like a social history of ideas, inspired by work such as Antoinette Burton’s discussions of Archive Stories (Duke University Press, 2005), Arlette Farge’s reflection on the Allure of the Archives (Yale University Press, 2013), Lisa Jardine’s discussion of Temptation in the Archives (UCL Press, 2015), and Ann Laura Stoler’s call to read Along the Archival Grain (Princeton University Press, 2009). Indeed, the stories of our research material evolve significantly over their life cycles, as Arjun Appadurai outlined in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge University Press, 1986). Beyond commodities and value, however, this workshop seeks to consider our affective relationship with research material, juxtaposing critical histories with reflections on practice.

For more details, see:

https://awmsmith.wordpress.com/?p=645&preview=true

Paper Trails Programme:

09:00 Registration and Refreshments

10:00 Welcome - Andrew Smith & Will Pooley

10.15 Session 1 (20 minute papers, 35 min Q&A)

Ian Stewart (LSE), In defence of antiquarianism: reflections on some long-lost letters

Helen Brookman (KCL), Perhaps Miss Jessie is not an expert in these matters’: Arthurian arguments in the margins of Jessie Weston’s The Legend of Sir Lancelot

11:30 Session 2 (20 minute papers, 35 min Q&A)

Rebecca Whiting (Glasgow), Archives in Conflict and Conflict over Archives

Maryanne Dever (University of Technology Sydney), Paper’s Intimate Affects

12.45 Lunch (45 mins)

13:30 Session 3 (20 minute papers, 35 min Q&A)

Andrew Smith (UCL/Chichester) & Chris Jeppesen (UCL), Midnight Crime & Music Hall: Unravelling Edwardian Bloomsbury’s Global Histories

Itay Lotem (Westminster), Getting into the head of the far-right: between interviews and loose paper trails

14:45 Comfort Break (15 mins)

15:00 Session 4 (20 minute papers, 35 min Q&A)

Alice Stevenson (UCL), Ancient artefacts and human lives in the archives

Martyn Barber (Historic England), Unpublished, unwritten, abandoned… The ‘lost’ books of OGS Crawford.

16:15 Keynote Commentary and Discussion (45 mins):

Margot Finn (UCL), Captain Cook’s Notebooks

17:00 Close