Please join us as three esteemed scholars discuss how archival research shapes the practice of American literary and cultural history in the 21st century. Panelists will share stories about their experiences using archives and discuss how archival work can facilitate cross-disciplinary efforts in the humanities.

Panelists:

Eric Slauter, Director of The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago, focuses his scholarship chiefly on transformations in political thought and behavior in the eighteenth century. He has a strong interest in the material history of books, and completed a project, Walden’s Carbon Footprint: People, Plants, Animals, and Machines in the Making of an American Classic. A blend of environmental, labor, and literary history, the project examines the supply-chain of raw materials in the 1854 first edition of Thoreau’s book (from cotton-based paper and linen thread to animal-skin glue), considers the many people who contributed to its production (including enslaved African-Americans in the South, commodity brokers, northern mill workers, European rag-pickers, and women and children in the printing trades), and reflects on the literary genealogy of our contemporary desire to know the origin as well as the environmental and social impact of objects in our daily lives. Eric will also be lecturing on Thursday, Febuary 2 at 4:00 PM at Angell Hall, Room 3154 on his project Walden’s Carbon Footprint: People, Plants, Animals, and Machines in the Making of an American Classic.

Cathleen Baker, Conservation Librarian Emerita (U of M), is a paper and book conservator and educator for more than forty-five years in England and the United States. She is the author of numerous articles and books including By His Own Labor: The Biography of Dard Hunter (2000) and the award-winning From the Hand to the Machine. Nineteenth-Century American Paper and Mediums: Technologies, Materials, and Conservation (2010).

Susan (Scotti) Parrish - Susan Scott Parrish is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan; she is also a Fellow at the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute (UM). Her book American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006) was awarded the Jamestown Prize and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize; the Emerson prize is given by the Phi Beta Kappa Society to one book each year for its contribution to understanding “the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”